Recent and related:<p><i>W4 Games raises $15M to drive video game development with Godot Engine</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38580742">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38580742</a> - Dec 2023 (85 comments)
Successful indie games tend to be released on all major consoles, so call it $2k/year for a small team or $10k for a larger one.<p>That is more expensive than GameMaker (Undertale, Nuclear Throne) at a flat $800/year, but a lot cheaper than the number of Unity Pro licenses you'd need ($2k/seat).
> At W4 Games, we are staunchly committed to open-source software, and our pricing model reflects this dedication. We provide full source code access for all tiers, empowering developers to customize and optimize our ports as they see fit.<p>Under what license terms?
This looks like great news for Godot! From reading the article, though, I can't understand what "per year" means in terms of console ports. Surely they won't invalidate your port at the end of the year, right? Is it just that you don't receive updates after the year is up?
I very much appreciated the wording and tone of:<p>> We trust in the honesty of our clients and that they will abide by the contract. We also trust they properly recognize their staff in the game credits.
Big red flag:<p>"Under the Starter and Pro licenses, when you stop paying, you lose access to the W4 console repositories. You are also not permitted to publish or further update any game you have published with our ports."<p>By its terms, the subscription must be maintained as long as you want to continue publishing the ported game (i.e., selling the game ) on a ported platform. As the subscription is prepaid, this means that it can be come cost-prohibitive for many, even most, indie games.<p>It can also be a bad deal for gamers: it means that after a few years, beloved but poorly-selling games will disappear from the console markets because the cost of the subscription to continue selling the game may well exceed the sales generated.<p>A flat fee upfront, or a % revenue share, is a more financially prudent option, since the first can be kickstarted and the second scales directly with sales as they happen.
I'm not in the space at all, but from my naive reading it seems like for bigger outfits the success monkey—er, manager—would be a great deal at borrowing an engineer with deep technical knowledge of the platform to do your bidding and fix all kinds of things not really related to porting.<p>If people take them up on it, I could imagine it becoming substantially less valuable over time as they get massively overbooked and you end up getting either 1/20th of an overworked engineer or 100% of a recently acquired clueless intern. (Though you could still get lucky and end up with 100% of a recently acquired clueful intern who is actually more valuable than most of the long-timers but is being given a conservatively sized workload.)