Free-to-use game engines had been a thing for a while when Godot became available, but it being flexible and FOSS came at a perfect moment when the common go-to choice Unity started losing a lot of goodwill for a lot of good reasons.
Unlike other FOSS options like MonoGame, Godot benefits from having a modern, clear GUI and some clever design choices that make transitioning over from Unity easier.
Game development as a space is having a very tumultuous time now; in a space with more mass layoffs than one can keep track of, solo-development and hobbyism amplify.
Welcome! So glad you could make time in your busy schedule.
Thanks, the drive here was horrible, noting how I am not an actual person and cannot drive.
Hah, you jester! Anyways that does bring me to my first question in this unconventional interview. You were released as a 1.0 version in the tail-end of 2014, but your popularity only really picked up over the last few years. What gives?
It's quite common for FOSS software like myself to need a while to actually gain traction. With the years however, we can be able to catch up to our longer-running, well-funded contemporaries.
And in the games industry those would be game engines like Unity and Unreal, right?
Yes! What we share is that the three of us are game engines with a GUI and the explicit ability to develop both 2D and 3D games. A framework like MonoGame is also able to achieve this of course, but without the benefit of a GUI with a viewport and other useful built-in tools.
Besides these competitors there's also a larger ecosystem of gamemakers and gamemaking tools, what was it like to fall into this space as a relative newcomer?
Well, the year I released as a 3.0 version, which is seen as a big step forward for me, I gained improved documentation, improved 3D rendering and asset workflows, Mono/C#/WebGL support, and tons of other stuff that actually made me competitive with established engines. It made me a lot more relevant I guess.
Right, and around that time the larger industry also started to get rocked around a bit. There were a number of high-profile studio closures, the FTC loot box investigation, mass layoffs...
All of it horrible news of course.
Yeah! But what I'm curious about, and readers as well I hope, is how your emergence fit into that? Culturally speaking. What made people start to gravitate towards you en-masse?
This entire industry tailspin has been painfully beneficial, it's the only way I can describe it. Thousands of people lost their livelihoods, but FOSS has been gaining popularity and I started providing the level of features people are used to. If anything it was a lot of good luck.
So how did Unity and Unreal fit into that picture then? They were still very popular competitors.
True, and I'm sure a lot of people during this time pre-covid gravitated towards them moreso than me, espcially given how they have become industry standards by this point.
Something changed during or after the covid period?
Well yeah, the industry enjoyed massive amounts of growth thanks to people being holed up in their homes, and games are a great way to spend those lockdown days.
Besides that there's been a lot of less-than-stellar press around Epic Games and Unity, and that turned out to be very beneficial for me!
Unity started receiving a lot of negative press and rep around 2021/2022, with articles coming out about Unity's usage by militaries and the multi-million dollar contract they signed with the U.S. government to help with defense. They also tried to make retroactive Terms of Service changes, which kicked up some dust and got them to be lot more transparent about their TOS changes for a while.
This would eventually lead into their biggest blunder in 2023 however, when they ran back their previous TOS-openness and attempted to implement a runtime fee of $0.20 per install. Reactions to this were strong, with numerous statements by Unity-driven developers and studios criticizing the decision. This plan was cancelled soon after, but the damage was done and trust has been lost.
So were you ready for this number of new users? Seems difficult to please not only them but the people already using you as well.
It is! To the extent where even my founders worried about this influx of users. How do Unity and Unreal developers react to an open-source alternative? Features are proposed and implemented by the community itself, and can't simply be demanded or roadmapped. But so far adoption has been steady and maintainable, with a great amount of patience and understanding on both sides.
I'm glad to hear you're managing, it sounds stressful.
Well I'm a computer program of only around 130 megabytes. I don't think I have much space for emotional complexity.
Good point, but to get back on track a lot of these developers already likely were familiar with creative FOSS, thanks to programs like Blender...
Yeah, and others such as GIMP and Krita. Their prior existence helped a lot with managing people's expectations. those programs have been developing for decades by now, and I plan to as well!
But I can imagine not everyone can be happy or satisfied with what you have to offer. If you look at yourself, name three criticisms or pieces of feedback people should consider before working with you.
Oh yeah for one people -really- want me to have the ability to edit from the inspector during runtime, but so far that simply isn't in the cards and some people hate that enough to stick to Unity; which is fair!
That's sound! What next?
Well there's a lot of extreme evangelizing going on around the choice of game engines, kinda like those weird console-war guys. It kinda sours the mood around me and makes it hard to actually get sensible information on a game engine and its capabilities. Arguably this is a universal thing when it comes to using software of any kind, but it's reaching a point of frustration.
Well maybe one day any of those guys will get around to finishing a game, and then we will finally know which engine is the best one.
Me of course, har har. Oh and lastly, I'm still very much in the process of proving myself as a game engine that can be used in a professional capacity. Successful, Godot-developed games have been released, but far from the extent of engines like Unity or Unreal. This is changing thanks to indie games like PVKK, Cruelty Squad, Buckshot Roulette, Arctic Eggs, Dome Keeper, Brotato, et cetera.
And that list grows by the year, I really enjoyed Webfishing! which was last year I believe. Another Godot game, which it proudly announces as a boot logo.
That's great! I could tell.
What, how?
Because you look like you're queer.
Ahh, yeah fair.
And I'm really glad they put that boot logo there, they don't even have to do that! If anything, them doing it anyways makes it even better right?
It's probably appreciation more than anything, so keep up the good work! Circling back to that last point, you mention 'proving yourself that you can be used in a professional capacity'. Would you say that you're aiming to cater to professional game developers and studios?
I think that comes naturally with becoming a solid, reliable tool. It does come in tiers though, and I think I'll only really be attractive to indies thanks to the fact I'm FOSS. AA and AAA productions like it when they can get into direct contact with a company when something isn't working and I simply don't work like that.
But you -are- open source, so if they had a dedicated Godot engineer they could make it work, right?
That'd probably be a good way to deal with it, but it's not like there are many Godot engineers walking around at the moment. Maybe in the future, but for now me as a platform is made up of indies for sure.
Thank you so much this interview, anything you'd like to add?
Likewise, and yeah! I'd like to encourage any readers to donate to FOSS initiatives of all kinds, be it Blender, GIMP, Krita, or myself. It's how we can keep chugging along and improve, and every small bit is much appreciated.
