W4 Games raises $15M to drive video game development with Godot Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38580742 - Dec 2023 (85 comments)
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).
Under what license terms?
> 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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.)
A porting house is a company that specializes in porting games across platforms. Lets say you've built a PC game with Godot, and now you wanna launch it on PlayStation. Instead of doing the porting yourself, you can outsource this to a company who would do the port for you.
It's should really be mentioned they talking of Godot ports.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Interesting I'd get downvoted for sharing this...
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
I would argue that "editorialize" is the wrong word here.
W4 Games (Godot) announces pricing model for console ports
W4 Games announces pricing model for [Godot] console ports
That said, the quoted rule above does prohibit this change because of the "Otherwise"—clarification isn't one of the reasons listed above it. I wish that something about basic clarification could be added. I almost missed this article because I only weakly recognize the name W4 Games as the commercial face of Godot.