[cycloptic]

I am not sure why you would feel threatened even if there was overlap. Godot is MIT licensed, so if your customers started asking for features from Godot or for compatibility with Godot, you could just copy the code straight from them without any hassle.

[vvanders]

As someone who's worked in AAA game engines this is like saying because C# is now open source it will be easy to just copy code into Swift without any hassle.

The part that makes game engines both interesting and difficult is they made a series of discrete trade-offs to support the use cases of the types of games they ship. This is true from tooling workflows to rendering stacks to core engine layout like if they do heavy arena allocation or more open world dynamic entities.

We extended the engine we licensed with some fairly reasonable features and even doing the uplevel was a brutal, 4-6 month process to reconsile those changes.

[cycloptic]

I am not saying it would be easy, it would definitely be work that someone would have to do. I'm more saying that the Godot authors would not try to threaten you or consider you a threat, it's more likely they would want to help you. Of course as a business you would not do it if your customers weren't going to pay the cost to make it worth it.

I don't know enough about the implementation of C# and Swift to say for sure, but it does seem like the open sourcing of that would making it easier to do things like port some standard library component or algorithm over from one to the other, or perhaps do something like building a Swift implementation for the CLR.

[vvanders]

Let me try to be a bit more to the point, game engine features are not just "drop-in", by adding a feature to one part of the engine there's a high probability that you make another part of the engine worse.

There's a reason that they say performance is the most leaky abstraction.

[cycloptic]

Then that sounds like you would want it to be an optional plugin, or a compile time flag that could be enabled for customers who want it? Why not do it, if that's what the customers asked for?

I get what you are saying and it definitely applies to the core architecture of the product, but if you have a large number of customers each with their own needs then I would be surprised if there were zero parts of the product that were modular or interchangeable.

[PoignardAzur]

> then I would be surprised if there were zero parts of the product that were modular or interchangeable.

You'd be surprised. Game engines are extremely monolithic.

There are some modular components and techniques (eg pathfinding, rendering, physics engine), but most of the effort that goes into an engine like Godot is integrating these components to their specific architecture. While the component is transferable (eg you can always use the Bullet engine in your own project), the integration work isn't.

[aflag]

Sadly, software is not (usually) that composable. If godot is a better engine all around, it would mean that competitors could offer a better service by just running godot in the cloud and charge per access, which they may be able to do for a cheaper price as they had very low initial investment.

[cycloptic]

Well, of course it would take work to compose them together, but then the pay off is that you might be able to say customers are getting the "best of both worlds."

If their customers are also asking them for hosted Godot, maybe they should also offer that as another product offering, at a competitive price, and then use that as a sales funnel into their other products? That is usually the way it goes with these open source bits.

[aflag]

They may be able to respond positively to a threat, but it can still be a threat. It may pay off to try to compose godot's code into theirs, but it may very well be cheaper to just rewrite things within their own framework.

Anyway, I'm just saying that free software can be a competitor and that you can lose to it even if you can, technically, embed their source code. Even if software was perfectly composable that would be true, but it's even more possible given that you can't always just plug in any new features godot releases. They may even be implemented in different languages, for all we know.

[cycloptic]

I don't see how it is a threat. Assuming Godot obsoleted all their code entirely, that would still be a boon -- that's now code they don't have to spend time maintaining anymore, and they can just reuse that and focus on their core competency. (Maybe it's hosting, I don't know enough about this business)

Different languages actually isn't as bad an issue with this type of thing, as the idea with running it in the browser is that it all compiles down to Javascript or WASM.

[aflag]

You are not taking the whole market into consideration. Maybe they are good at writing the game engine and then hosting, but others may be better at just hosting. So, they could be outcompeted by people who don't want to pay the cost/risk of building an engine. Others may be better at hosting godot than they ever will, although those people would not be there if there was no godot or if godot was not free. Free software (copyleft licenses in special) can be a threat for commercial software in two ways: a. users may just jump to the free alternative and leave yours b. it levels the field so new competitors can come in without paying the initial investment you made.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying that they are incorrect in assessing that godot is not a threat. They seem to consider they have other features beyond godot's scope which is what differentiate them in the market. What I am saying is that free software can certainly be a threat to a business. In fact, it can be even a larger threat than a single competitor, because it can turn your product into a commodity.

[cycloptic]

I still don't see what you mean. It sounds like you are saying the real threat would be if they had no other features that could let them stand out in the market, at which point a competitor would be able to beat them by lowering the price, possibly to zero. That can be done by any competitor and has very to do with the license -- my point is that the open source license on that "competing product" actually helps them, by allowing them to make use of the same thing without having to pay that initial investment again. And the first initial investment you made isn't lost as long as you keep a path to retaining those customers.

To put it another way, if the actual problem to the business is that they are falling behind on feature velocity and don't have the head count to keep up, re-using some features from open source code could actually help there.