Huge congratulations to our brothers and sisters at the godot project, who just received a $250,000 grant from Epic! The focus for the new resources will be on improving graphic quality and the built-in game development language, GDScript.
With great excitement, today we want to officially announce the great honor of having been awarded an Epic Megagrant!
This is a huge honor for us and greatly helps to keep on improving Godot development at an even greater pace. We want to personally thank Tim Sweeney for the encouragement and support, and for sharing the belief that open source software makes the world a better place.
11 Comments
I think that Unreal a Godot need improve the C# support, this will be the standard in gamedev, is very inconvenient for a programmer use other engine and need use other dev language like C++, GD Script or Lua.
Would this be something like Autodesk giving a grant to the Blender foundation? Curious how this makes sense for Unreal Engine- or whether it is something of personal interest to Tim Sweeney?
Only a little bit ;-)
It’s worth noting that Epic makes the vast bulk of it’s revenue from game sales - primarily from its own games, but also through sales on the Epic Games Store, where they take a 12% cut from third party games.
They essentially give the Unreal engine and source away for free; if you use it for a commercial game they take 5% of the sales revenue for said game (if you sell the game through the Epic Store they include this 5% in the 12% cut mentioned above).
Note also that games sold through the Epic Games Store don’t have use the Unreal engine, so assuming a game created with the Godot engine meets Epic’s standards it could be feasibly next sold through the Epic Games Store.
I don’t know whether Epic provide revenue figures for the Unreal engine, but’s hard to imagine they represent much more than a rounding error, compared to games sales. A more capable Godot engine doesn’t represent a threat to Unreal engine, it represents potentially more future revenue for indie games sold through the Epic Games Store. That possibility (and the good will it generates), makes a US$250k investment sound like a great idea I reckon.
Yes- that makes a lot of sense. Thanks!
I'd also add that Tim Sweeney, a self-made billionaire who insanely wrote the first Unreal Engine from scratch, is quite fond of the spirit of development and entrepreneurship.
Incentives aside, I also think he just enjoys giving back to the dev community. He's given a lot back to upstarts, students, fundraisers, and various open-source/FOSS initiatives like Blender, Krita, Lutris, and now Godot.
Though, as Pez said, Godot poses no major threat to Unreal Engine, and Epic Games likely have a reasonable expectation and incentive in gaining from any potential Godot indie games sold at their Marketplace.
Yep- that makes sense.
Looks like a bribe to make them cease the development lol Otherwise Tim Sweeney seems to be shooting himself in the foot.
Not really.
Godot poses no real threat to Unreal Engine. Are you aware of just how robust Unreal Engine 4 truly is? It's millions of lines of code and decades-worth of industry-shaped architecture ahead of Godot.
However, Godot is ideal for smaller indie games...which can be sold at Epic Games' Marketplace.
Plus, besides their engine and Marketplace, Epic Games has so much expanded enterprise with UE4, now venturing into non-gaming applications like VR/AR tours, military use, arch-viz, advertising, and even Hollywood film potential, Godot isn't remotely close to seeing that kind of scope.
Tim's not sweating over the humbler but promising developments like Godot. They see more upside to helping the indie dev community than impeding it.
Joking aside, who could seriously believe Blender would be able to rival ADSK a few years back? Never say "never" as they say. Nobody knows what the future holds. Anyways, I can't wait to see what happens next with Godot. Really happy for them.
True- but since Epic makes money from the games and not the game-engine it would make sense to support the dev community- and $250,000 is a rounding error at their scale- and the goodwill engendered would make this a sound investment of resources.
Godot.
GDscript or C#.
Are the Godot team looking sideways at the games friendly compiler that Jonathan Blow is designing?
https://www.youtube.com/user/jblow888/videos