For a moment, I was thinking Defold ought to dual-license their engine under both the current non-OSS modified Apache and the GPL. That way, you'd have the option to either:
1. Commercialise software created using modified versions of Defold, without releasing the source of your modified version, as long as you don't commercialize your modified version of Defold itself.
2. Commercialise a modified version of Defold, but you must make the source available under the GPL. (Which would mean that source could be used by the upstream project as well.)
But while typing this up, I noticed the flaw in this plan—the parenthetical isn't true! Because the upstream project would be dual licensed, they couldn't use GPL licensed code.
Of course if they do, I hope they will say "either modified Apache or the GPL".
My company's lawyers made a big stink about us using jQuery plugins that said "and" instead of "or".
There’s no reason to assume that a paid fork would reduce the number of free Defold users; it can happen, but depends on what is built and offered, and sometimes paid forks are good for the ecosystem and increase the number of overall users.
If you need to add an extra API or something to the core to make your paid extension work, you can't charge for that, which I think is designed to incentivise "improve the extension API, contribute that back to the core project, then go wild on your commercial extension and see if you can get people to pay for it."
I have no clue whether this approach will turn out to work in the medium-to-long term, but it's a fascinating idea and seems at the very least like an experiment very much worth conducting.
(it's not)
If they do, look out.
Unlike Defold, both Godot and O3DE are actually free.
That number is vastly smaller.
If Godot games were making anywhere near the revenue that Untity games do, I’m willing to bet they’d there would be an Amazon fork.
(and it's still bigger for Godot)
It also doesn’t matter what the user base is today. It matters what it might be tomorrow. It’s not easy to change your license. If you wait until Amazon is coming for you, it’s too late to do anything to stop it.
For example a company might try to sell a version of engine which has been ported to a console which original engine doesn't support. Game porting companies are very common and if it's their main business then they will usually have inhouse libraries or modified engine versions which significantly simplify the porting process.
That's exactly what's happening with open source game engines like Godot. Their documentation lists almost a dozen companies providing porting service for godot games. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's up to author of game engine whether they want to allow others to profit from their work in such way.
Seems like currently Defold supported platforms cover most of the popular consoles, it was probably not the case during early development of engine when license was chosen or in a few years when next generation of consoles come out. Someone might also be selling a better console support than what defold provides out of the box. Beside the consoles there is also stuff like integration with various PC stores like GOG,Epic and others. Its not necessarily a huge work, but plenty of smaller devs want to focus only on the gameplay aspects. So once a game is finished (and you are tired from development process), buying anything which significantly reduces porting/integration effort can be an easy choice.
One more example of major feature which can require tight engine integration and motivate buying a modified version of "free engine" is multiplayer support. Good multiplayer support can be quite tricky with some game genres being harder than others. There have been many attempts at providing magic multiplayer solutions which under the hood automatically synchronizes all game entities without developer thinking about it. Such approach isn't necessarily going to be as good playing experience as designing the game with multiplayer support in mind from day 0, carefully thinking how the game state is organized, what when and how is synchronized. But that requires planning ahead, technical expertise and suitable budget. Commercial multiplayer middleware for existing engines are also not uncommon.
Whether something like that is considered an addon or modified engine version depends on exact licensing terms and the exact implementation details how game engine and addon code is organized.
A slightly different example - game engine built on top of game engine is RPG maker. For a long time RPGMaker has been it's own game engine. But few years ago developers of RPGMaker made a version of RPGMaker which is built on top of Unity. Plenty of other genre specific engines (especially for fighting games) built on top of general purpose game engines. Again the line between modified engine, addon and game with builtin editor is tricky.
Edit: clarity
Tbh I'm a little more confused after reading this
Why?
There is the requirement to make the source code available (GPL), as far as I am informed, you can sort of get around this, by delivering the source code with the download, but then "don't advertise" it, as in hide it as much as possible without getting in legal trouble.
(My information may be a bit outdated here) Afaik, the Blender Foundation doesn't even bother to shut these projects down (they do get frequently informed about it, when people discover it).
And this even given the fact, that they would be easy to shut down. The reason for this, is used media in advertising. If you want to sell your 3D package, you need to show some impressive artwork which was created with said project.
Problem is, the images/animations these projects show off on their websites are a) not created with said Blender reskin, but usually in Blender itself and b) they usually don't have permission from the artists.
So even having this quite comfortable handle, BF usually don't care. Which tells a lot about the impact of such copycats.
My takeaway from all this is, the situation would pan out pretty similar for Defold, and they should just dare it and monitor the landscape.
Which of their license changes makes you feel sad and why? Were you planning to sell their editor?
It does seem like a bit of problem, but it also seems like a very specific thing that could be… cleared up, and then it would be all sorted.
That would be like shipping photoshop with your game to allow people to customize their character’s hair color.
Shipping 3rd party engine tooling is not. At all.
The equivalent to what valve did would be if Defold released some games made with Defold and then released the Defold engine, which is basically what happened.
There’s also nothing stopping from releasing your game, linking to Defold and saying use Defold to mod this game.
> “Game Engine Product” shall mean software used for video game development. This includes both the content authoring software and the software used to show the created content.
The license allows redistribution so long as:
> a) You do not sell or otherwise commercialise the Work or Derivative Works as a Game Engine Product; and
So my read is that any tool that allows you to modify game content constitutes a game engine product and they specifically do not allow you to sell a game engine product built with Defold.
This weird technicality that is invented in this discussion about whether or not you're using Defold's built-in engine tools, or developing your own tools on top of Defold is entirely irrelevant to the language of the license.
It’s not enough that your game could be used by someone for video game development, a reasonable person would have to believe you were selling it as video game development software.
There’s definitely some gray area here for something like Roblox which is a game, but also allows people to develop and sell video games. But the risk of Defold suing you and a court finding that the map editor you added to allow people to make free levels for your puzzle game constitutes selling your game as video game development software is so far down the list of things you need to think about at all that it’s not worth considering.
If you want to make something like Roblox that is essentially a game engine, I wouldn’t use Defold. Otherwise I wouldn’t worry even a little bit.
My worry is about 'otherwise commercialise', in cases where the ability to have fan made levels is an advertised feature, as is often the case.
But I agree that this is less of an issue than I first thought, and appreciate your explanation.
(so if the extension API is missing something, contribute the feature(s) you need back to core, then you can write your extension free of issues, so far as I can tell)
You do not sell or otherwise commercialise the Work or Derivative Works as a Game Engine Product.
"Work" shall mean the work of authorship, whether in Source or Object form,
made available under the License, as indicated by a copyright notice that is
included in or attached to the work
"Derivative Works" shall mean any work, whether in Source or Object form, that
is based on (or derived from) the Work and for which the editorial revisions,
annotations, elaborations, or other modifications represent, as a whole, an
original work of authorship. For the purposes of this License, Derivative Works
shall not include works that remain
separable from, or merely link (or bind by name) to the interfaces of, the Work
and Derivative Works thereof.
Modding a game engine’s editing tools to the point where they are user friendly enough for your players is almost always a bigger challenge than building basic editing tools using the engine.
This entire argument is insane to me. Someone is releasing something for free with the caveat that you can’t use it for this one specific very uncommon thing. Then people are up in arms “what if one day I want to do this one specific thing? Do you? No but what if I did?” Don’t use Defold.
Here's some commentary I made in another thread on this post:
Support [1] page:
> With our support, you can rest assured that the services you rely on are well integrated and kept up-to-date in your games, letting you focus fully on launching and operating the games in your portfolio.
> Please contact us at [email protected] for more information on how we can help you publish great games made with Defold.
About [2] page:
> Product development, marketing, support and sales - Refold AB is owned by members of the Defold team and is contracted to perform most of the day to day work on the Defold product.
Open [3] page:
> Q: Is there still going to be a roadmap for Defold?
> A: The Defold Foundation has decided to no longer share a public roadmap at the beginning of each year.
The website-summarized version of the license says:
> You can not commercialise original or modified (derivative) versions of the Defold editor and/or engine
It sounds like this would only be a problem if you're literally shipping a modified version of Defold. No game with any kind of financial incentive does this for a built-in map or mod editor, because it would make it incredibly easy for other people to then sell a modified version of their entire game.
It's kind of like if Apple made the Xcode source available, and then said "hey you can't monetize a modified version of Xcode." No one is going to ship their app's entire Xcode project to players just so the players can make a custom map.
The normal way for games to do this is to implement a brand-new map-editing UI inside Defold (or Xcode, Unity, Godot, etc.) that spits out custom maps in the exact data format that the game can parse.
Seems fair, but sadly not OSS. I wonder why they think it's necessary?