Unfortunately it bakes in analytics that feed data back to King, not even you. Basically they're getting you to do the dirty work of getting them more entries in their customer tracking databases without them having to even make another Whale Acquisition Saga.<p>Also you're not in control of your own source code. It's stored on King's servers. I'm not trusting them with my shit.
Disclaimer: I'm a developer at King. I work with "Fiction Factory" other of King's internal engines.<p>We had some weeks ago an internal presentation by the CTO and the Defold team. They explained their goals for doing it. The goals, as I remember them, to give Defold for free are:<p>* To improve Defold. The bigger the user base the more stable, relevant and useful it will be the product.<p>* To show people that King is a technology company. We do cool stuff.<p>* To be able to hire developers that already know our tech stack.<p>The first point is the most important one. What have helped to grow other engines has been a community of users that have helped to improve them in features and stability. Some times users help open source engines like Ogre3D, others they help paid engines like Unity3D. We think that King can offer a win-win situation with a free (like in free beer) engine with exciting features in exchange of a community that uses it and makes it relevant.<p>This ideas are in the box titled "Why are you releasing Defold free?" at the bottom of the site. If you want to read them from an official source.
I've spent some time prototyping with Defold and found it a joy to work with. The write once run anywhere is great but the real power comes from live changes. You can edit code while the game is running and see live changes. Iterations taking a few seconds (even on target platform) is a huge win for game devs.<p>I'd recommend checking it out as an alternative to Unity if you are making a 2D game.
I found the previous discussion interesting because it shows how far this project has come over the last few years: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4791284" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4791284</a>
Feels like King come up against a significant wall of resentment when they do anything, perhaps some of it justified some of it not so much.<p>Defold seems like a nice idea. As with any games engine it's never about the quality of the engine but the asset pipeline you put in front of it (see Unreal engine for a grade A example of this). I didn't see much talk about the asset pipeline, I see people from King are around, anyone care to comment?
Where's the redirect to some app store bullshit after 5 seconds?<p>Never buying or using anything from those sleazeballs, and you should follow suit.
Considering these guys tried to trademark the word Candy, among other questionable actions, I don't think I'd use/trust anything they offer.
I got a couple questions for the devs behind it. We've also looked a bit to at it, we're a cocos2d studio, but thinking of moving to cocos2dx or unity for future projects, and ofcourse Defold is an interesting alternative as well.<p>My questions are<p>1. Can you extend the engine with any missing features. Two example cases: If we want to use some iOS specific feature that Defold my default doesn't support. Or if we'd wanted to implement Spriter support (instead of Spine).<p>2. Can you write your own shaders? Only thing I could find on it, is some tinting stuff, but that's not enough.<p>Thanks for releasing the engine for free and keeping it 2D focused!
A very cool talk on the Clojure tech behind the tooling of the engine
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajX09xQ_UEg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajX09xQ_UEg</a>
Surprised by all the vitriol in this thread. Defold looks awesome. Maybe I just haven't tracked King closely enough in the past to have developed the community knee jerk reaction here, but this seems like a cool move.
Build once deploy anywhere to six different platforms sounds too good to be true. Code existing on King servers sounds super sketchy. I do like that you script in Lua, which is pretty standard in gaming. Still, I'm probably going to stay away from early adopting this.
The demo on the first tutorial page (<a href="http://dashboard.defold.com/projects/16850/tutorial/0" rel="nofollow">http://dashboard.defold.com/projects/16850/tutorial/0</a>) is majorly broken, including styles and with dozens of console errors. Interesting project to keep an eye on, not ready for the spotlight yet though.