
Here's why King gave away its 2D mobile game engine Defold - cpeterso
http://venturebeat.com/2016/03/19/heres-why-king-gave-away-its-2d-mobile-game-engine-defold/
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vanderZwan
I think the contalk about how Defold uses Clojure and an in-memory,
transactional graph database to make the GUI highly customisable might be
interesting to the HN crowd:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajX09xQ_UEg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajX09xQ_UEg)

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Svoka
Just to be clear 1) all Clojure and other goodness have nothing to do with the
game engine. It is editor only. 2) it's not even editor one can download -
instead you'll get something based on Eeclipse, which has nothing to do with
what is in video 3) Weirdly overcomplicated system around something others
(like Corona) was doing for at least 3 years already

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vanderZwan
Thanks for the context, I was not aware of any of these things!

Not sure if I agree with the "weirdly overcomplicated system" comment though,
it looks like a fairly elegant system to me?

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Svoka
ok. Elegant, future system, not tested in real world, seen only in youtube
video. P.S. I'm actually looking forward seeing it. Pardon my scepticism.

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jay_kyburz
I really want to love Defold, but just think it too big a risk to build your
business on a game engine that you can't fork and continue to support if
Activision / Blizzard decide that is not making money for them anymore and
drop it.

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Drinkandcode
I think EULA covers this case.

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TY
Looks interesting, but I'm not sure how much traction this will get outside of
King.

Compared to the competition, such as Corona SDK, King will have to work real
hard to build a community and ecosystem around Defold.

In 2016, having a great technology alone is not enough to get traction in game
dev, all other parts of the ecosystem matter a lot: language, plugins (own and
third party), art assets, tutorials (written and video), books, mind share
retaining efforts (podcasts, events and etc).

Unity got this quite right, others are working hard to catch up (Unreal,
Corona in 2D space).

Being open source is a huge boost as well, in terms of flexibility of
development as well as peace of mind for the third party devs that the owner
of the engine won't switch to the dark side with the next leadership change or
simply let the technology get obsolete by not releasing new versions any more.

Still, I welcome this, Defold is a cool engine - hope that King open sources
this eventually.

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bko
Just to note, that Defold won't be open source:

> GamesBeat: Is this going to be open source? Hartwig: It’s not open source,
> but it’s free of charge. There are no royalties or team size limitations.
> You get all the features on all platforms. For us, the main driver—There are
> two reasons. One, we believe that opening the engine up to external
> developers will increase our product quality. That will benefit us
> internally when we develop our games. Two, we want to support the game
> industry. We think we can bring a lot of value to the whole industry by
> helping indie developers create awesome games.

~~~
Svoka
This was very weird to read, especially with King's attempts to sue/patent
troll dozens of indie studios which used anyt of the words "Candy" "Crash" or
"Saga" in their game titles.

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ajbetteridge
Couldn't find a link in the article, so found it at
[http://www.defold.com/](http://www.defold.com/)

