“Sadly, I Think Godot Is a Scam. I'm Not Sure I Can Do This.”

https://godotforums.org/d/35412-sadly-i-think-godot-is-a-scam-im-not-sure-i-can-do-this

by flykespice • 3 years ago

65 91 3 years ago

h2odragon• 3 years ago

warning26• 3 years ago

Everyone always talks up Godot as the Next Big Thing, but as far as I can tell zero notable games have been made with it yet.

Are there any Godot games out there that are more than just tech demos?

Shadow591• 3 years ago

Brotato is a Godot game that I’ve had some fun with. It’s not a graphical or technical masterpiece but it’s a fun gameplay loop.

ragingroosevelt• 3 years ago

I haven't looked for a exhaustive list, personally. But off the top of my head I've been really enjoying Dome Keeper. And a friend of mine is almost to the point of having a gold build of Doomsday Paradise that's coming out this fall.

immanentize• 3 years ago

Cruelty Squad and Cassette Beasts

starkparker• 3 years ago

The Deponia series moved 2.2 million units in 2015–16. Cassette Beasts shipped on PC and consoles in April and moved 30k units in its first week on Steam, before its console ports. Sonic Team shipped Sonic Colors: Ultimate on PC using Godot (notably without required attribution). Id contracted out a modern PC and console port of Commander Keen in Keen Dreams to a developer who used Godot as a bridge to the original C codebase. The Carol Read casual adventure game series has used EgoVenture/Godot since 2021, switching from Wintermute.

whywhywhywhy• 3 years ago

Cruelty Squad is excellent.

DarkNova6• 3 years ago

Dome Keeper

Not a massive hit, but profitable and fun.

favorited• 3 years ago

A published Sonic the Hedgehog game used Godot (in part).

kshehab1• 3 years ago

As a few have said, Cruelty Squad is a banger. But there's also Wrought Flesh and Endoparasitic. Fun stuff!

n3storm• 3 years ago

In 2009 I was involved in a game using BGE and Godot already was gonna put down Blender.

justin66• 3 years ago

Everyone always talks up Godot as the Next Big Thing

Not everyone. It has an enthusiastic fan base that is vocal on message boards, but 99.999% of game developers have never touched it.

cas8• 3 years ago

Cassette Beasts is another fairly popular game made with Godot: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1321440/Cassette_Beasts/

imtringued• 3 years ago

https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41324400-Is-it-made-w...

Click on top sellers.

izacus• 3 years ago

Who's this Everyone person?

kernal• 3 years ago

I too had the same impression and then looked at their showcase and IMO it was very underwhelming. The showcase for libGDX looked a lot better which was surprising to me.

droptablemain2• 3 years ago

Stopped reading after I encountered this ridiculous statement:

"Well, strange, if someone made it in 1 night, they could certainly fix it in 1 night"

I'm guessing the person complaining is not a developer and/or has never worked on a large scale project.

wahnfrieden• 3 years ago

…

droptablemain2• 3 years ago

Well maybe she shouldn't frontload her argument with stupid fluff.

cirrus32• 3 years ago

The statement says a lot actually

iaaan• 3 years ago

Yeah, there's a lot of entitlement in this post. It sounds like this person is mad that they heavily financially contributed to an open-source project and they didn't get a return on their investment.

I don't have enough context from this post alone to understand what is going on with the $8MM situation, but if the rest of the post is anything to go by, sounds like a nothingburger.

a1o• 3 years ago

If I understood the person is also the maintainer of the forums (dev + admin), so probably more contribution in time than money, and the time being significant part of the person life.

cirrus32• 3 years ago

yea, or any project really... making something and making something that works right can be wildly different amounts of effort

I was also put off by the use of the term "scam". Seems like the person is just upset funds are not being spent in the way he would like and yea maybe that is a problem, but "scam" is a leap.

kabdib2• 3 years ago

How many folks here have spent linear weeks patching up someone else's 1 night efforts?

[/me raises one hand, buries face in the other]

Bonus points if it's your own 1 night effort. :-)

Terr_• 3 years ago

Or the wonderful week+ bugs where the fix turns out to be a single line. (Especially when it comes down to something that corrupts memory.)

contravariant• 3 years ago

Hmm, I'm pretty sure it wasn't 1 night, but mostly because there's only so many bugs you can write in a single night.

yjftsjthsd-h• 3 years ago

Bonus points if it's your own 1 night effort. :-)

Are you really a serious developer/architect/sysadmin/devops/engineer if you haven't muttered "what was this idiot thinking?" about your own code at least once?

Turing_Machine• 3 years ago

Brendan Eich created JavaScript in ten days, and people have been trying to fix it for 27 years.

rcme3• 3 years ago

That's not a kind reading of the complaint. Someone added a "feature" (baked light maps) with one day's worth of work. However, the feature was incomplete and broken and it took a whole year to "fix." That definitely seems like project mismanagement. This ties in to the OP's broader complaints that things are promised and never delivered or delivered in an incomplete and unusable state.

johnfn2• 3 years ago

I mean, even that interpretation seems like a wildly distorted view of reality. I've been watching the Godot community for years now and they're one of the most productive teams I've ever seen. Simply looking at the changelogs for minor versions and seeing how many bugs they fix and features they add should be proof enough of this. I mean, my god, for 4.0 they rewrote all of GDScript, and that was just a line item. The fact that someone's pet feature slipped through the cracks for longer than they would have like smacks of either a lack of understanding of the software development process, or entitlement.

djur3• 3 years ago

"The project is mismanaged" is a much different and less incendiary claim than "the project is a scam", though.

ambicapter• 3 years ago

But it's understandable that there are bugs, particularly with a large codebase and many contributers. The main issue I have is the broken promises and lies. For example, once on Twitter I asked Juan about why mixed mode shadows were not supported (this is when the level is baked but characters have real time lighting, a standard feature in Unity and Unreal). And he tells me that shadow mapping is faster. I don't know if he misunderstood me, but real-time shadows are not going to be faster than baked lighting. There is a reason almost every AAA game in the last 20 years has used some form of pre-computation. Eventually I found someone with the same problem, and they looked in the code and it was actually a 1-line fix (I saw the image, it worked). But the PR was never merged, for whatever reason. I also had a problem where I loaded a DirectX normal map into Godot (which uses OpenGL coordinate space) and it was messed up. I mentioned I had the wrong normals, and he says there is only one normal format, despite like 20 years of history of differences between DirectX and OpenGL. Again, I thought there might have been a misunderstanding, but these little kinds of things were starting to add up.

Doesn't seem like I'd give the Godot developers full benefit of the doubt either.

anon848736283• 3 years ago

Yeah, I read the HN comments before the actual post, and it was less unreasonable and unhinged than I was expecting.

johnwheeler• 3 years ago

The author seems extremely biased not only by emotion but a misunderstanding of how the world works. If those two are the founders of the company of an open source product, who cares if they raise money? Nothing is owed to the OP or Godot. The rest seems to be about technical disagreements. Again, who cares? Not a reason to accuse someone of criminal activity

ricardobeat• 3 years ago

Definitely true, but I don’t agree with “nothing is owed”. If you start a company on the back of an open-source project, you do owe it somewhat, and suddenly abandoning it when it needs support is a very questionable move.

throwaway290• 3 years ago

The sad reality is some people prioritize real work and some prioritize hustling and money and do minimum work needed to keep getting money.

I don't know if this is that case, but company's mission is to support Godot ecosystem and if lead maintainer raises millions USD for this and then a few months later says there's no money... it's reasonable to think he pockets it. If he sets the company up so that it's impossible to tell if he pockets it... Another red flag.

If so that would be sus enough that project reputation would be done in my eyes.

anon848736283• 3 years ago

Later the author makes the point that the funding was secured based on the association with the Godot project, not only the reputation of the founders. That may be naive but it's not unreasonable. It does seem disingenuous for Juan to turn around a few months later and say there is an existential crisis with the project funding. Surely the startup funding at least pays for the core maintainers to continue maintaining.

Now of course, anyone who knows startups knows the founders are suddenly going to be way deep managing a company and not have time to do OSS management. There should have been a plan to delegate responsibilities to a dedicated employee or other member of the community. The lack of time to manage the OSS and the appearance of a conflict of interest is not hard to predict here...

adeon4• 3 years ago

If you found a company with the tagline "Our mission is to strengthen the open source Godot ecosystem", speak for Godot, get $8M dollars of funding, and have nothing to show for it (allegedly) for the project then I think the Godot contributors have every right to question what happened to the $8M. And they would care because by contributing they've invested their time and effort on the project.

I'm not familiar with Godot or if the things mentioned in the post have any real merit but reading it as an outsider it's at least not obviously nonsense.

Maybe not fraud or owed anything in the legal sense but does seem crappy if they wasted the money.

Reading Juan's twitter it does seem like the $8M is for W4 games and is not an extension of the Godot project. I still do think it's a bit sketchy that project leaders make a company revolving around their open source project, and then ask for money separately for the project instead of using the funding they got.

EDIT: After a bit of checking, W4 games does seem like they fund Godot as highest tier sponsor: https://fund.godotengine.org/ Which means they must be using their seed fund. The author is probably angry without properly researching things.

djur3• 3 years ago

The tagline is "Our mission is to strengthen the open source Godot ecosystem _by providing companies with the commercial products and services they need_". Omitting half of the sentence changes its meaning.

unintendedcons3• 3 years ago

Lack of literacy, and lack of financial literacy, caused this misunderstanding.

It's clear to me that Godot Foundation funds Godot development, and W4 took VC money for funding ecosystem services. Absolutely different things.

I hope this author makes their peace and apologizes or transfers responsibility for the forums to the Godot Foundation.

ilaksh• 3 years ago

If they took money for "ecosystem services" and the main Godot forum operator has been paying out of pocket without recompense after the raise, they have reason to be angry.

If, after money being raised like this, no one gives them money to pay for the forum (including all previous expenses) which they have been running out of pocket and provides a core service to the community, they should shut down the forum and delete the posts.

unintendedcons3• 3 years ago

Agreed. The foundation should absolutely be paying those costs, and take that off the shoulders of this long suffering and burned out individual contributor.

jasonlotito• 3 years ago

the main Godot forum operator has been paying out of pocket without recompense after the raise,

My understanding is that this is a community-run forum. Nothing in the post suggests they are asking for money to run the forum.

Further:

Juan is painting this picture that Godot is out of money and begging on social media, meanwhile with $8M in his wallet

That's a flat-out lie.

I don't know; there is no evidence presented, and what is presented in the post is inaccurate.

As of right now, I can safely assume this is someone who wants to cash in.

ozfive2• 3 years ago

It was made clear on the W4 page that: "Additionally, W4 Games pledges to support Godot financially with no-strings-attached donations to the project."

If W4 Games has received 8 million dollars in funding but hasn't contributed any of it back to the Godot project as stated in their pledge, then there would be an inconsistency between their promise and their actions.

The text on the W4 page explicitly mentions their commitment to donating improvements made to Godot back to the community AND supporting the project financially. If they have not fulfilled these promises despite having significant funding, it would raise concerns about their integrity and whether they are truly dedicated to their stated mission.

Let's see the transparency of donations to the Godot foundation?

mort966• 3 years ago

W4 got funding from venture capitalists. I'm certain that nobody who invested thought they were making a charitable donation to fund Godot development. It's not like the $8 million are just badly funds from donations.

And I'm sure those investors would be very, very angry at W4 if W4 just ran away with the money which was invested to fund development of products and services to give W4 a revenue stream, donated it to the Godot Foundation instead. In fact, I'm betting that would be quite illegal (and if it's not, the investors would certainly fire the CEO if that happened!).

unintendedcons3• 3 years ago

Yikes, looks like NO transparency about Foundation financials!

I was expecting OpenCollective, not PayPal!

schnuri• 3 years ago

It's called “Godot”, of course you have to wait for it.

vietthan• 3 years ago

If I never took drama class, I would have never gotten this joke. Well done.

ehutch792• 3 years ago

I'm a bit lost here. What's the scam part? I mean, there's clearly a fully functioning game engine, that's open source, with public development on github, right?

I'm not seeing anyone taking money and running.

anon848736283• 3 years ago

It does sound like there was poor expectation management in terms of bug fixes, release timeline, milestone scope, etc. The author sounds like a domain expert with game engines but not a coder, so it makes sense they would not realize how wildly unreliable estimates can be. The point about a PR not getting merged and times when the maintainer didn't seem to understand core domain concepts does seem a reasonable thing to be concerned about.

ehutch792• 3 years ago

That’s not a scam though.

_madmax_• 3 years ago

The whole development process is a give and take between deadlines and features.

My impression is that she's dissatisfied with the leadership of the project, and voices her many concerns publicly instead of working it out or working towards constructive collaboration.

I can understand that to a certain degree but if/when you do that, don't start by saying that 1 night effort means 1 night fix.

That's a grotesque expectation.

CodeWriter23• 3 years ago

I'll give the Godot founder the benefit of the doubt. I'm guilty of thinking things take less time / project turns into a time-indebted ponzi scheme. In the past of course.

lusus_naturae4• 3 years ago

Some posts are questioning why the OP of the Godot complaint post is saying money raised for W4 should be used for Godot. I believe that may be because the Godot ecosystem was used as a justification and evidence for that funding? I am not aware of the issues here, but at least reading just the mission statment from W4 website

"W4 Games is a new company created by Godot Engine veterans Juan Linietsky, Rémi Verschelde and Fabio Alessandrelli, and veteran entrepreneur Nicola Farronato. Our mission is to strengthen the open source Godot ecosystem by providing companies with the commercial products and services they need."

Godot is also literally mentioned on their webpage

"We pledge that all the improvements made to Godot as part of the company’s activities will be donated back (whenever legally possible) to the community as pull requests to be reviewed and considered for inclusion."

Also this:

"Additionally, W4 Games pledges to support Godot financially with no-strings-attached donations to the project."

https://w4games.com/

I am not saying W4 folks did this, but a troubling trend for FOSS is building something on free labor (volunteer work by a community) and using that for funding other projects without investing back into the project that got you there.

mort966• 3 years ago

I don't see the problem. W4, whose mission statement is to build commercial products and services around Godot, got seed funding from venture capitalists in order to get off the ground and build those products and services. Unrelatedly, the Godot Foundation, whose purpose is to fund and develop the Godot project, needs more funding to keep up the current pace of Godot development.

There is nothing weird or shady about those two things being true at the same time.

It's all good and well that W4 has made a pledge to support Godot financially, but there's surely no expectation that they'll do that before they have a revenue stream? If W4's investors wanted the money to go to Godot, they would've just donated to Godot instead of investing in W4, right? We can't expect W4 to just take the money they got from their investors and spend it on donations to Godot instead of what was promised, right?

djur3• 3 years ago

None of those quotes should be understood as a promise to donate their _seed funds_ (the $8 million) to Godot, though. W4's FAQ also says:

"The Godot project is fully independent from W4 and will continue to raise funds to pay contributors as it always has."

mort966• 3 years ago

Is this whole thing based on a misunderstanding of what "unrelated to the Godot project" means?

I'm not familiar with the situation, but from reading the post and the linked tweets, it looks like W4 Games isn't the Godot Foundation, W4 is a separate company which happens to be run by some of the founders of Godot. From the mission statement on the website:

Our mission is to strengthen the open source Godot ecosystem by providing companies with the commercial products and services they need.

It seems like the majority of Godot development happens by people employed by the Godot Foundation, which makes sense, and W4 offers products and services around Godot, which also makes sense. Sort of a "Canonical offers commercial products and services (Ubuntu Pro) around the Linux kernel, but doesn't do the majority of development on the kernel itself" type situation.

The post says:

This doesn't make sense, the whole mission statement of W4 Games was to grow the Godot ecosystem, but now a few short months later, Godot has no money and development will slow down. This is suspicious, to say the least.

but, like, there's no logical contradiction between "a company focused on providing enterprise products and services around Godot has a bunch of money" and "Godot development slows down because the Godot Foundation can't afford to keep developers on payroll".

Literally the only potentially shady thing I could see here is if people were mislead into donating to W4 because they thought W4 would focus on development of Godot itself? But the post doesn't even make that claim, much less provide proof for it, so that doesn't seem to be the case.

So the only thing that's left to complain about is that development is slower than ideal, but that's the case in most software projects. It's not like anyone expected it to be quick and easy to make a game engine which rivals Unity and Unreal, right? ...right?

lusus_naturae4• 3 years ago

If you read W4 site: "Additionally, W4 Games pledges to support Godot financially with no-strings-attached donations to the project."

mort966• 3 years ago

Yeah, and I'm sure they'll do that eventually, as W4 grows into a profitable company with a stable revenue stream. But the $8 million wasn't pledged to go towards the Godot Foundation, right? That wouldn't even have made sense, if people wanted to donate to Godot, they would've donated to Godot.

vblanco• 3 years ago

I once had a possible series of PRs that would increase performance of godot renderer, fixing considerable bottlenecks on scene rendering on CPU. Reduz didn't like the changes and it went into the "will be fixed for 4.0" deflect. To this day most of those performance fixes arent there and 4.0 is slower than the prototype i had. My interaction was very much not positive.

Even then, i believe that godot leadership is doing a great job. Its almost comparable to the amazing process Blender has. This post looks to me like a ridiculous statement. Reduz and other godot leads get constant pestering from hundreds of people daily, Godot even has thousands of issues on the github repo for bug reports.

The godot project and W4 spend their money wisely. I know some freelance developers who got hired for doing some project features. Someone like reduz just does not need to scam anyone, because if he wanted money he could likely work for other companies as a low level Cpp engineer and get more money than what he pays himself with the w4 funding. That w4 funding is being used to make godot into a "real" game engine, with console support which is needed for the engine to be taken seriously by commercial projects and not just small indies or restricted projects. Setting up a physical office and a place to have all those console development kits costs money, and hiring developers experienced in those platforms is not cheap.

In the way i see it, the godot project often develops features in a "marketing" fashion. This clashes quite directly with people using it for serious projects. Unity engine has a very similar issue. We get things like development effort being spent on fancy dynamic global illumination while completely rejecting the classic static light maps (needed for lower end), and even basic features like level-of-detail or occlusion culling which are considered a must-have that every engine has. I think this is what makes the poster cyberreality in the linked forum so angry. Its one of the big faults of the engine, but its not that bad as a development idea. Those fancy big features attract a lot of users, who can then provide feedback and bug reports, PR their fixes to the engine, and of course, funding and hype. The main team makes sure that the architecture of the engine is good, with some fancy big features, and the bugfixing and more niche/professional features are left to community that can PR it. Github is filled with "better" engines from a technical standpoint with a total of 1 user.

richardjam73• 3 years ago

https://nitter.net/reduzio/status/1679058914547998721

The twitter thread mentioned on the post

chamakits• 3 years ago

This reaction from the owner of the Godot forums really reinforces my frequent realization of what a miracle it is that any large open source project exists, and how hard it is to try to get any monetary compensation from open source.

Some key members of the Godot project attempted to commercially monetize their future efforts in a way that will likely benefit the community at large. Unfortunately some parts of the community believe this is either a betrayal or that they should also be compensated equally without being part of the same commercialization efforts they are taking on. Both of these groups are providing value to the community, and one group attempted a way to get compensated.

When I started programming and learned about open source, I greatly benefited from it and hoped that one day I’d give back. But the reality is that unless you are prepared to sacrifice your free time for thankless work, you should reconsider.

Unfortunately things cost money, and the way to pay for things is to get paid for spending time working. And that time and mental bandwidth competes with open source. You’ll be doing the same type of work that you could be paid for if you were doing it for a company. But you aren’t. It’s just as hard work as the work done in the time people sacrifice in exchange for a salary, but you won’t get monetary value out of it. And you are opening up yourself to criticisms and demands and stresses to the same level or higher as if you were under employment and as if you were compensated for it. But you aren’t. It’s thankless work for which if you are expecting compensation you are likely to be disappointed. And if you find a possible way which could allow you to contribute to the community leveraging your past experience, but the work is no longer free or shared with the community you’ll be criticized for it.

Anyways, long winded way of me saying; it’s a miracle open source projects exists. And it’s also a miracle that people can dedicate their time to manage communities around them. They are both valuable, and they should both be done with the realistic expectations of getting nothing back in return. But I’ll give my thanks to those that do it.

MildRant• 3 years ago

Something that has gnawing at me for a while but this is why I don't want to get involved in FOSS. I don't have the capacity to deal with people like this. If I'm Juan or one of the Godot leaders I wouldn't even know where to begin addressing this. I guess starting by explaining that W4 and the Godot Foundation are not the same entity.

jallen_dot_dev2• 3 years ago

I honestly don't get the outrage.

The main complaint (setting aside the preamble about bugs and feature delays) is that Juan (creator of Godot engine) raised $8.5 million for his company W4 Games and is now asking for donations to support Godot. W4 Games has the mission statement "strengthen the open source Godot ecosystem by providing companies with the commercial products and services they need."

Now from reading this post, I assumed the money was raised by some sort of crowdfunding and that backers may have been led to believe they were supporting Godot directly. And now they are being asked to donate again, and the money they gave previously is going to some private company.

But no, that's not the case. I looked up the press release[1] and the money was raised from VC firms.

So this guy is mad that Juan is not using the VC seed money he raised for a Godot-related company to fund Godot directly.

This seems like completely overblown and misplaced anger.

[1] https://w4games.com/2022/09/13/w4-games-raises-8-5-million-t...

adeon4• 3 years ago

While doing some checking, here's some things I found:

W4 games (accused in the post of not using $8M seed fund for Godot), does actually give money to Godot: https://fund.godotengine.org/ (they have an icon as "Platinum Sponsor"). Doesn't say how much though.

The income from donations is around ~23k EUR (including everyone, not just W4)

Godot expenses are around $40,000 monthly to pay contractors. (https://godotengine.org/article/funding-breakdown-and-hiring...)

That would make them cash flow negative. But it's not true that the $8M is being kept entirely to W4 and not being used for Godot.

“Sadly, I Think Godot Is a Scam. I'm Not Sure I Can Do This.”

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