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Heres a link to the linked post: https://godotforums.org/d/35412-sadly-i-think-godot-is-a-scam-im-not-sure-i-can-do-this
Comment by the previous community forum owner (before the one that shut it down) that I feel should also be put in this thread
While I cannot speak for Cybereality and his experiences and feelings on Godot and such, i can speak a bit more on the forum side of things.
I ran the Godot Community Forums for 4 years and 7 months, back when Godot 3.0 wasn’t even in alpha yet. However, I resigned in May 2023 and handed the reins over to Cybereality, whom I believed would run the forums similar to how I did and seemed enthusiastic to do so. I resigned because I realized I didn’t have the time to dedicate to it like I felt a leader should and so, instead of being at the helm but not having the energy to properly help the forums grow, I stepped down. Simply put: I was burning out and didn’t have time to run the community, and Cybereality offered to take over it and so I passed it along.
I did not expect this turn of events and I am saddened by the entire thing. I understand being frustrated with the direction Godot can take, the difference between expectations and reality, and can sympathize with not running a community you do not believe in. However, I am most saddened that the community we built together on the forums is frozen in place simply because of an individual’s feelings on all this. The forums was more than just one individual, even if that individual was the owner of the forums. I know there are great people in the Godot forums that may have been willing to take it over should he have offered. Cybereality is a good person, and I wish him the best, but it saddens me to see years of community be locked in place. The forums grew so much in the last few years and has become a wealth of information on Godot, and while I am glad it is kept in read-only mode rather than being deleted, it pains me to see the forum community this way.
Something I’d like to address though, because I think there is a bit of a misconception on how long Cybereality has run the forums and what that means finically. I’ve seen a few claims that he’s spent hundreds or thousands on the forums.Cybereality has only run the forums for a few months, since May 15th. The reason I bring this is up is that, prior to this point, I was solely funding the Godot forums for the entire 4 years and 7 months, I did not take donations, run ads, or ask anyone to help fund it. While I understand that Cybereality has claimed to have spent hundreds (and he may have! I didn’t have paid plugins and such, and my server provider didn’t charge for bandwidth/vistors), I know for a fact that the forums cost (roughly) a couple hundred a year when I ran it, not hundreds a month. He certainly has not spent thousands on the Godot forums if he ran it the way I did. He has only spent his own money on the forums since May when we transferred the server to him, prior to that the forums were funded entirely out of my own pocket and no one else’s. I don’t know what server he used, whether he paid for bandwidth, how expensive the plugins he bought were ,etc., but I do know that the notion (implied or otherwise) he’s been paying for the forums for years is false, he’s only been paying for it for a few months.
Finally, the forums were never an official Godot social platform and we were entirely community driven, unlike the other Godot communities that are linked on the Godot community page. The forums was also linked on the Godot community page, but we ran our own ship, had our own set of rules (we observed and adhered to the Godot Code of Conduct, at least while I ran it), and forum staff (entire volunteer!) were composed of people from within the Godot forums community. We managed ourselves and did our best to make a healthy community. I can confidently say that the forum staff I worked with were some of the most talented people who really cared about the community and helping everyone use Godot, and we all spent countless hours of our free time to make the forums what it was. We truly tried to make it a place for all Godot developers, at least while I was running it.
It saddens me to see that it all went down this way and I’m sorry for everyone on the forums who enjoyed and participated as part of the community. I hope you all find new communities to join that are just as special as the forums. I also hope that Cybereality finds another project he can believe in and is able to pour his enthusiasm into that project and help whatever community he lands in next grow. I wish everyone I interacted with over the years on the forums the best and I hope you all keep making games (with Godot or otherwise) and find great communities to be a part of.
- TwistedTwigleg
Wow, so this guy sabotaged a community of almost 5 years in just a few weeks because he couldn’t understand how financials work. And has now left it open with a big “Scam warning” at the top, that will damage the reputation of the entire project.
Maybe he should pass it on to someone else instead of acting like an overgrown child throwing a tantrum.
Yep. The communication about funding could be way better from Godot, but this forum maintainer is at best naive, if not completely delusional.
They don’t understand how hard running a large open source project is:
- They call them amateurs for not fixing long standing issues that they probably just don’t have time to get to.
- They complain about a one line change/fix not being merged for supporting mix-mode lighting - both pre-baked and real-time. I need to double check that I didn’t misread that because of how absolutely insane that sounds.
- They complain about broken stuff without realizing all the stuff that reliably just works in Godot.
- They complain about 4.0 being called “stable” without realizing that stability refers to API contracts not being broken (at least this is the case, according to another forum member).
- They also think game engine development is easy apparently because they could get something working in months of working with OpenGL or such, that probably doesn’t support all the same features, isn’t as nice to use, isn’t as cross platform, etc.
- They also think they are so well informed about the engine development because they made literally one contribution to the Godot code. They have been using Godot for years but that just still screams of a lack of knowledge of all the Godot internals and how OSS development works.
- They complain about a case where MIT licensed code was used without attribution. Legitimate concern but very likely just an oversight. Godot has a copyright file with detailed attributions and someone else indicated the code was adopted from a long time ago.
I get that it’s frustrating seeing a new version of software not fix your problems, but this person really just doesn’t know what they’re talking about. They have some legitimate concerns/complaints, but calling it a scam so publicly is just completely ridiculous.
I read the post and I really think they are in the wrong. A few things stand out, and the forum owner seems more upset that feature A and feature B don’t exist or are not like the other engines.
Sounds more like the issues with Godot and W4 are the same issues loads of startups have, and it’s not going well. To call it a scam and a grift just sounds like buzz wording to make Godot and W4 look bad.
But this stood out
Well, strange, if someone made it in 1 night, they could certainly fix it in 1 night.
Again, they are just simply asking for too much.
Exactly. To me, if you tell me someone made something complicated in one night, I just hear “hacky proof of concept that would take weeks to get right”.
Previous owner of Godot Community Forums got burned out and didn’t curate the first month of co-owning this platform - here we have a clear-cut case study against prematurely transferring ownership. One could look at it and think that Cybereality took over the forums only to sabotage them in a few weeks. But it might be a rather spontaneous product of zir heated discussion and disagreement with Juan, so I’d write this off to a “happy” coincidence. Cybereality already explained it’s about confusion around allegedly broken promises with W4 and Godot Foundation.
Looking at the bigger picture, it’s a case study of problems with centralization of community in confines of something close to walled garden, around the project that is supposed to be as open as a vocabulary. More the reason to raise awareness of Lemmy communities, Matrix Public Archive, etc.
IMHO this has the typical hallmarks of a psychotic episode, with paranoia and rash decisions like that. They will probably regret it in a few days and re-open the forum.
Hopefully they’ll have the good sense to put this kind of reaction in the hands of a community or a trusted group of cohorts.
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Theres been some confusion recently with W4 games and godot. Essentially some people who run godot made a company called W4 games to handle things such as console ports that godot itself cant do due to being open source. W4 games raised 8.5 million dollars from investors https://w4games.com/2022/09/13/w4-games-raises-8-5-million-to-support-godot-engine-growth/ and recently godot has created a blog post saying they need more funding https://godotengine.org/article/funding-breakdown-and-hiring-process/ .
One of the arguments thats been going around is why is godot saying theyre going to scale back development and say they have lack of funding when W4 just got a big investment. The thing is though that the two entities are separate and have separate income and goals
Heres some points people have made for and against this
As separate as they might be, the W4 link does say, in its title, that the money raised was for “Godot Engine Growth”. I can see why people are not happy about this.
Yeah with that though its extremely vague what they mean by growth. Technically having the possibility of console ports in godot is some form of godot engine growth and would attract people to the engine who might be still using something like unity due to the capability to export to switch, etc.
The second paragraph is
The funds will be used to expand W4 Games’ core team and accelerate the development of a suite of products and services for the Godot ecosystem, enabling all developers to create and publish games and applications on all major platforms. The company will present its product roadmap at GDC 2023.
W4 link does say, in its title, that the money raised was for “Godot Engine Growth”.
From reading through the forum thread replies (I’m not familiar), it sounds like W4 is a separate legal entity than the Godot foundation, and the $8.5M in question is from commercial investors.
If true, then it would literally be fraud to use that $8.5M for other than it’s intended purpose, which unfortunately seems to mean something different than actually working on the Godot engine itself.
The Firefox dilemma all over again
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If he started disliking Godot 3 years ago, I have the feeling he was planing this shutdown since he became owner.
I can understand the accusations that Godot tends to over-promise on features and then push them back. As a user of the engine I’ve seen firsthand features getting flagged for the 4.0 milestone, then 4.1, and now 4.2. There are some pretty big bugs that are still unresolved and I get that. But the accusations that the lead developers of such a big and complex project are stealing money based on a hunch that the forum owner has is just ridiculous.
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The devs have talked about missing features many, many times. The official Godot team is small, it’s just a handful of people that are officially working on the engine and there are some spots like Physics that are completely missing a dedicated person working on it (but allegedly they are almost done with hiring). The devs work hard, there are tons of merges every day on GitHub but when they say “this feature will come in 4.0” they actually mean “we hope someone from the community will work on it by 4.0”. Making accusations saying the devs are wasting money and aren’t working hard when Godot has such high effort put into it is ridiculous.
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Calling the whole project a scam and closing the forums is kind of rude. Godot is an open source project, hundreds of people poured in their efforts over many years to make this project a reality. Why tarnish the reputation of the project and everyone else if your disagreement lies with the project lead?
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Why not just talk to Juan directly??? Why make an entire post over a hunch and some tweets? His tweets could’ve been as simple as just casual marketing to make as much money as possible to put into the project. Or it could’ve been they spend their money on events and marketing. Or it could’ve been they’re storing money in case of emergencies. Or it could’ve been anything. Making sudden accusations without even assessing the situation with Juan is a terrible move.
I still like Godot and I still believe in what the lead devs are doing honestly. cybereality’s post isn’t very convincing nor is there any evidence it’s a scam. $8 million sounds like an infinite amount of money but I think he might not realize how big of a project it is and how much money they could need. Besides, it’s an open source project and it’s not like they’re going to steal the engine from us. Saying it was all a scam and meant nothing is… Well… Dumb.
It’s also how quickly we went from conversation to shut down that gets me. Maybe there’s more stuff I haven’t seen but 4 days from post to shutdown is a pretty damn tight timetable.
With what Godot 4 is capable of, $8 million sounds like couch change.
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Someone should scrape the forum while it’s still up, and recreate it with a mix of static and live content, so people can continue from where they left off, just with a new admin at the helm.
I will say Juan is exceptionally bad at public communication, and personally, I’m glad he has been working on passing the torch to other people in the project (especially since too many projects rely on The Guy Who Can Do It All). Guy is a bit confusing to follow and I tend to go to other members for info.
Now, I can be convinced that Godot has management issues. Godot 4.0 was a pie in the sky goal filled with over estimation of ability to finish things. The engine underwent a re-write to almost every system and feature. It was a development hell as when A got changed B need to be updated, when B got update C need to be fix, and so on.
But, I’m not concerned that it was “all a scam” as major mile stones did see progress. I cannot stress how incredible the work on bi-direction text was. BiDi text is hard. It was messy. It was complex and complicated. Even big engines like Unity have spent a decade getting nothing done. Additionally, I remember how rough 3.0 was and 4.0 was an even bigger leap. 4.0 was trapped in development hell, and hopefully it’ll result in the Godot project learning from that trial by fire.
This forum post reads a bit like someone suffering from burn out. Even I had to clock out of following 4.0’s development until the team decided to push towards release. It was a fucking slog of development. With tons of features being pushed back because it would break 3.X compatibility or couldn’t get done in time for 4.0. I couldn’t imagine putting the amount of time and money into Godot that they have.
Almost everyone who has been around the project for a long time has had problems with Juan. I was an early contributor in 2015/2016, but after reading some of the responses he made on Reddit I stopped contributing. I’m happy to keep using his engine for free, but I decided he’s not the kind of person that deserves my contributions.
Could you elaborate on what kind of issues you had? I haven’t been around for that long.
Shws again how fucking stupid it is to call something you don’t control “official”. Can’t control Reddit and now another community breaks down because of admin bs and knowledge will be lost.
IMO the true villains are the console manufactures restricting open source/free software.
Listen, these are serious claims against the Godot foundation, the core team, and W4. If they’re true, I could maybe see shutting down the forum as protest. But this can also seem like the forum owner trying to hush the community and control the conversation.
If we consider some mismanagement without any outright wrongdoing, closing the forum stops us from talking about these issues which doesn’t make much sense. There’s also chatter about passing ownership of the forum in the middle of the thread, which makes me wonder why they’d close the forum at all.
Nothing about what they described seemed to support the claim that Godot, or even Godot’s fundraising practices, is a scam. People respectfully point this out multiple times and the only response is basically “I already explained it to you. Prove me wrong.” It’s vexing to read.
And they go on to say that because of a limited scope demo they made, they know that the people working on Godot don’t know what they’re doing. Another bizarre claim, honestly.
There was a very open attitude to discussing the potential issues among the leadership as well as frank discussions about realistic alternatives in that thread. I wasn’t familiar with this forum, but it seems like such a shame that it’s been shut down due to what appears to be an just an angry admin who felt personally entitled to more from the Godot project.
Couldn’t agree more, this only hurts the community members.
I only meant that even if their evidence and conclusion wasn’t paper thin this course of action still doesn’t make any sense. So for me their claims and actions are pretty much completely without merit. And there was already plenty of level headed pushback even in that thread.
Glad you brought up the demo, that was fucking bizarre. As if a proof of concept with no supporting details is all you need to completely understand the development and concerns of a massive codebase that is one of the most compatible, and most usable out there. Two qualities that tend to complicate things dev wise.
Gosh, what a mess… I don’t know how active this forum is or was, but if someone were to pick things up once more to run this forum reasonably I assume they could simply open the door to some donations?
