Facebook and Godot: Page 2 - Godot Community Forums

Facebook and Godot

jbskaggs

Moderated game options is better option- than completely offer every single thing out there with no guide as to what would be good or not.

I dont think VR will not be the hit as many believe becuase of what @fire7side said above- not to mention its another $300 to $1000 beyond the cost of the orginal phone or pc.

The WII had the boomer market by the short hairs and lost it due to bad marketing, innovating too quickly, and not educating their market. Every nursing home in the nation had a WII system and they had Wii bowling tournaments and Dr's actually encouraged play on the WII because it had team sports that the people understood. WII U just confused that whole market and they were hard to purchase. And the rest homes didnt keep investing in the systems anymore and the whole thing died off. VR is kinda similar except it is dangerous. If grandma dies playing it and falls, there will be lawsuits no matter the user agreements. Lawyers always find loopholes and the juries only have to be sympathetic. Not to mention when JR. is using VR porn and the whole family walks in the living room and sees him in a less than honorable manner, because he is oblivious to the outside world.

METAVERSE makes sense in fiction novels, and Zuckerburg thinks people want to live in a VR world. Meta does the opposite of what FB does. FB connects people in a super fast easy way anywhere you are, runs 24/7 on all your devices. Meta VR will only work where ever your VR set is plugged in, and people most likely arent going to want to hang out in your VR apartment with you- no more than they want to do so in the real world. But maybe he's correct and that's what people want, and IM full of hot air.

jbskaggs

@cybereality said: I used to make Facebook Flash games at one point. You can still make money, sure, but it is nothing like the early days. People have moved on, it's nowhere near as big as it used to be. I think Facebook (well Meta, now, they are no longer Facebook technically) are more interested in VR since that is the future. I think web games will still be big, but like the weird stuff on Itch, no one likes FarmVille anymore.

Stardew Valley. And others are still going well. HTML games do not make much money. Phone games have the majority of market dominance. The issue is still marketing. If you have a good game and get your game in front of the right people it sells. Most games have very bad marketing and have no idea who their target audience even is or how to market to them. Or even what to market about their games. Or where to market their games. Not to mention most do not have a marketing budget whatsoever and was not even a concern when they wrote the game. Publishing, distribution, marketing are afterthoughts for the majority of these games on itch and elsewhere that flooded the market.

cybereality

Stardew Valley was an amazing game, though. There was a story, you could interact with characters, the art was very good. It was 100x better than FarmVille, which was essentially a clicker game with no depth.

fire7side

I tried Stardew Valley but didn't last very long. It still boils down to a management game where you plant crops, etc. Not quite enough challenge for me.
It's really hard to come up with ideas if you eliminate combat. I like stealth and I like puzzles, but I'm not sure that's enough to keep a game interesting. It almost seems like you would need some type of management task where you get money for selling things. I think it just needs a little more challenge than what I get from stardew valley, although I probably didn't give it enough of a chance. I should take another look at it.

jbskaggs

I got 30 seconds into it. It isnt my cup of tea either. Rpg + Farmville+ great art+ great music+ polished gameplay + genius marketing = international multiyear best seller.

I did study the mechanics and marketing and the guy is a marketing genius. He used writing his game as a marketing strategy one man's saga of a single dev versus the giant mega developers- showing his grinding laborious trek from drawing trees to coding loops thru his crowdfunding marketing and to this day maintains high steam and gog presence and his story is discussed constantly as motivational talks for small businesses not just gaming.

Not only is there a story in the game- his marketing plan tells a story as well. Hard not to cheer for the guy.

DaveTheCoder

@cybereality said: Well the way Godot is set up, no one can buy it or control it. Even if Facebook had $10 gazillion dollars in cash, they couldn't buy Godot. So there is no danger at all, and the founders were smart to set it up like this.

What if Facebook's owners offered huge salaries to the key Godot developers to work exclusively for them? They might then create a new, improved, commercial variant of Godot under a different name.

I think the MIT license would allow the existing Godot source code to be used in a proprietary project, unlike the GNU GPL. But I may be wrong about that. In any case, the developers could work around that by rewriting enough of the code.

Of course, the existing Godot source code would remain in the repositories and free for anyone to resume development.

But that could derail the project.

cybereality

Yes, that of course is a possibility. Anyone can be bought. But knowing Juan and the rest of the team, I do not think they would agree to making a commercial closed source version of Godot (but I guess if the price was right, well there are some offers you can't refuse). And yes, taking MIT code and making a closed source commercial project is 100% legal.

But Meta, or Microsoft, or anyone can do this anyway since the code is MIT license. Unlike GPL, you are not required to release your changes as open source either. Even Epic could download the Godot source from Github, reskin the interface, and call in Unreal Indie and charge money for it (if they wanted). This is still in the spirit of open source and not necessarily a bad thing (that is what you accept when you use a permissive license).

jbskaggs

Yeah the wikipedia link posted described how this process can happen. I dont think it will but here is how Microsoft pulled it off with web browsers:

Embrace the open design and push the project. Enhance it by offering financing and creating new and exciting innovations to the project connect their name to the project. Extinguish by creating a new fork of project with new innovation to that design that is propreitory and impossible for the original developers to legally or financially duplicate.

But I dont think this is a high risk for Godot right now. Nor is godot the financial temptation that Unreal was. All that could change when a few big hits are released in godot. It wasnt until Undertale success that Gamemaker really became a interesting purchase for Opera. Even then it took a couple years for Opera to make the decision and decide to buy them. And I think Opera long term may save that company.

cybereality

Well Godot is based on open formats so the EEE tactic would be difficult. If i recall correctly, Microsoft is on the board at Khronos, so they could (theoretically) add new features to glTF or even OpenGL, but they would need to be approved by the committee and would be open source and usable by any developer or engine.

Even if Microsoft made a glTF fork (which they can) called msTF (or whatever) no one would use it cause all the glTF developers are probably Linux and open source aficionados and wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pool. Other formats like MP3, and such, are in the public domain, and JPG is controlled by the JPG committee, but I believe the patent expired some time ago.

Again Microsoft can't do anything about this, and competing image formats like WebP and such (while much better) have not gained any traction. So there is really no realistic way for Microsoft to turn Godot proprietary because any changes would be for the worse and no one would use them.

Megalomaniak

@cybereality said: cause all the glTF developers are probably Linux and open source aficionados

I wouldn't count on that being the case, but the big benefit of something like glTF is that it's an open platform so taking that away it would kinda lose it's meaning, yeah.

jbskaggs

I agree I dont think Godot is at risk at this time. But if it does seem serious just create your own fork and keep a public version going and protect it. That is a common thing among Linux software- forks breaking off to keep a certain direction or go a new direction. Its part of the whole open software idea. What some folks hate is when a fork is made that goes commercial. Personally I dont mind that as long as they dont try and sabotage original.

BTW I love webp and my cancer game uses them. Its another awesome factor that godot has! Affinity designer doesnt use webp so I have to convert them with imagemagik. Krita of course does make them but Im just faster in Designer. I dont know if Gravit makes webp.

cybereality

Yeah, WebP is the best. I guess what I'm saying is that no one really uses it. Aside from Google (or Apple's own format, HEIC) everyone just uses JPG. Even though JPG is objectively worse in all metrics, file size, quality, etc. But it has become the de facto standard and is compatible with everything, so that makes it hard to beat.

jbskaggs

I think thats changing. Most web dev's I know use webp. Its like all the strengths of gif plus png at the size of jpgs. But Seriph deliberately made the choice not to support it as it isnt a big real world print industry format.

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