> 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.
> 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?
It's way better if you leave a place of work, go have a fun career, and come back 15 years later and get assigned some cleanup work. You can't even rant about it.
So much for letting that problem ride for the next sucker...
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.
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.
> 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.
This doesn't disagree with OP at all. For instance, I remember the announcement for baked lightmaps. According to OP, despite the fanfare, the feature didn't actually work. I don't use Godot, so I can't really comment on the validity of OP's claims, but just reading the changelogs isn't sufficient to dismiss OP either.
The changelogs don't tell the full story. I've been trying to use the C# since Godot 3.0 when it was announced as the new hot feature and.. it wasn't ready, it was missing big essential integrations (like exported variables). Then 3.1 comes around promising "no for real, it works now" and it STILL wasn't ready. Sadly I've been noticing that this overpromising and underdelivering is the trend in the release notes.
They overpromised on a free project, which you didn't pay for. It's a non-commercial project - I'd give a lot more leeway for that. Otherwise, go to Unity, and see how fast they fix the bugs in the things they promised to deliver.
Moreover it wasn't that they were lackadaisical; they overdelivered on other aspects of the Godot project. Sometimes some pet feature can wait, compared to improvements for other serious features that affect a wider profile (e.g. GDScript, C# integration, and the tons of other stuff in their 4.1 changelogs). Their resolution and closing of issues on the Godot repo is also really impressive and consistent for an open-source project.
> They overpromised on a free project, which you didn't pay for.
I think part of OP’s issue is that “they” (the main Godot developer) is starting a for-profit business that directly profits from the community’s goodwill. OP themselves is paying hundreds of dollars a month to run the forums not to mention the time investment. I can understand the frustration of seeing the community languish while the main focus turns to a for-profit enterprise.
The OP has only been in control of paying for the server for a few months. They only took over May 15th.
The original owner only paid a few hundred dollars per year for hosting the forums. Whatever the OP is doing that is making it cost hundreds of dollars per month is on them...
Furthermore, why did the OP take over control of the forums only a few months ago if they have been feeling this way about Godot since 2020?
I regularly send a few euros their way every month because I still wanna support the idea of having a nice FOSS engine, but whether I'm paying or not doesn't matter. If you want people taking your project seriously you need to build a credibility, and by always shipping half-baked features and calling them complete you do the opposite.
Instead what we get is the fact that I cannot trust release notes to be accurate while redux complains on twitter that the big companies are focusing on sponsoring O3DE instead.
I'll admit that it took time, but C# in 4.0 is amazing - I've used it and it's totally a first class citizen.
> overpromising and underdelivering
Man, this is an open source project done off donations. Doing an integration with an external language is so challenging that the Unity team - a group of fully salaried professional developers - actually abandoned their "JavaScript" and "Python" integrations.
They are still ironing it out. Not missing anything particularly of what you would expect from C# itself, but GDScript still has the edge in some things eg. master/puppet function annotation for multiplayer (unless that changed recently, but I could not find documentation about it).
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.
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.
He mentioned that just paying for the forms cost $100s a month, so yes he is investing heavily.
Having that kind of money to throw at it makes it kind of odd that he doesn't understand financing and how it would be fraudulent to raise money for W4 and then spend it on the game engine
Eh, people can have money and not understand finance. Early in my career I had a very lucky and very lucrative contract that gave me a six figure income at 23 years old. I was not experienced enough to understand financing but I paid for a lot of things for other people’s projects and hobbies because I felt like doing so.
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.
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."
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
...
W4 Games intends to play an active role in strengthening and professionalizing the Godot ecosystem while remaining as just another citizen of the community, as we believe that Open Source works best when individuals and companies benefit from each other’s contributions on a level playing field. This way, everybody wins and the project benefits as a whole.
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.
Additionally, W4 Games pledges to support Godot financially with no-strings-attached donations to the project.
That is just saying that they will be giving some donations to the project. I have zero insight into W4 or the Godot Foundation, but they may have already donated. They don't claim to be the sole financial contributor to the project.
Looks like they do donate: https://fund.godotengine.org/ (W4 games is an icon there as "Platinum Sponsor"). It doesn't say how much but given the amounts in the lower tiers it's probably not entirely insignificant.
So they _are_ actually using their $8M seed fund to fund Godot.
I do wonder if the author of the original post did their research properly. W4 games doesn't need to donate but they do so anyway.
"pledges to support Godot financially" doesn't mean they'll give all of the money they raise.
If anyone has right to be upset about how W4 Games is spending its money, it would be the people who gave it that money. But I doubt the VCs are upset, because the money is going to building a company that might return on their investment.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Agreed. The foundation should absolutely be paying those costs, and take that off the shoulders of this long suffering and burned out individual contributor.
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?
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!).
It wasn't fair to claim that some of the $8 million should go to Godot. What I should have said was don't make claims on your site and to people supporting and using Godot
or any other open source community that aren't true.
This person just wants some compensation for covering the forums for Godot which sounds reasonable to me. The way it was worded wasn't clear but the underlying intention was clear.
I think it's completely reasonable for this person to not want to host the forums out of pocket for no compensation any more. If that was all this post was about, I don't think anyone would have any problems with it. It's all the stuff about Godot being a scam and complaints about how W4's seed funding from VCs isn't being donated to the Godot Foundation that's absolutely baffling.
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)
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
It's a reasonable to say that W4 has its own obligations, though just based on that snippet on the home page it's hard to say what the extent and constraint of those obligations are w.r.t Godot. I don't think it's necessary (or fair to Godot) to assume that stable revenue for W4 is a requirement.
I am not involved in this ecosystem nor do I have the whole history of it to say if there were any broken promises. I guess then it's up to the responsible parties to hammer out misunderstandings with their open source developers (who I feel for). Clearly there are mismatched expectations around.
I agree that there seems to be some mismatched expectations around, but I don't get why. Why should the expectation be that the seed funding from VCs to found a startup would serve as donations to the Godoy Foundation? If so, why? Nothing in TFA even mentions anything which could be construed as promises to that effect.
Now what would truly be a scam is if the founders of W4 raised $8m of seed funding based on false promises, then donated all that cash to the Godot Foundation instead of developing the products which were pitched to the investors. I genuinely don't understand why there's apparently an expectation from at least some people that W4 would do that, or why so many people here (you included!) think that's a remotely reasonable expectation.
It's a good question, isn't it? Why does the Godot community (and not just OP) feel like they did "work for free". I've seldom come across this kind of sentiment elsewhere in opensource, so I am wondering why in this case there are mismatched expectations. Like I said, as an outsider I can't speak to any of this properly as I don't have more context. I am keeping an open mind either way, you may completely right in assuming that there were no promises made (legal or otherwise) that gave rise to this kind of expectation misalignment. The point I am making is this: regardless of the separation of Godot Foundation and W4, if the goodwill and work of the community was used to ensure some kind of future for W4, then it makes sense to pay that back in kind.
That's a good question. I'd assume "work for free" could be more accurately worded as "taken advantage of". After all, the vast majority of FOSS projects involve unpaid labor, and no one complains about "working for free" in FOSS.
What I mean is this: when a FOSS project is entirely community funded, one's hard work is just giving back to the community. But once a profit is made by the project, your hard work should now be compensated. Otherwise, you're being taken advantage of. For the forum OP, they're probably coming from the view of "why should Juan (and others) get paid for shipping half complete features when I'm not just paying out of pocket for the server everyone uses, but trying to help as best as I can (bug reports)?" After all, $8M for W4 is supposedly gone while Godot itself is in the negative every month? On the surface, that looks sketchy.
There is a bit of entitlement in such a thought, I'd argue, but it's not completely unjustified.
For another example, Linux's and Blender's main developers get paid, but they're the exception to the rule. Any community involvement in the form of patches and bug reports are all unpaid. But people don't complain about that because the Linux Foundation and the Blender Foundation are both non-profits. W4, however, is a for-profit. So, millions are going to a for-profit organization while the people working on the non-profit side languish.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.