A non-earmarked donation for general development sounds particularly generous, that's great.
I have a litany of particular complaints about every game engine or framework I've ever tried, but Godot is by far my favorite option for 2D game development. The scene tree model works extremely well, and C# is pretty close to a first class citizen at this point.
I love Godot! I really find it pleasant to work with. It was designed decades after Unreal and Unity so it is much cleaner conceptually. Although admittedly less fully featured and less optimized in some places like physics.
As engineers, people on this forum should support open source alternatives for game engines. So much AR / VR software is going to depend on this. I don't care if it is Godot, LJGL, Resy or what have you, we should get behind it.
Actually first version of Godot was made in 2007 so it's only a couple years older than Unity (2005) and only 9 years older than Unreal (1998). It's probably cleaner conceptually though as it was pretty simple when it was open sourced (2014 I think?), so less baggage to fix, versus something like Torque3d which never really caught on after it was open sourced, despite being more fully featured than Godot at the time.
I actually saw a demo of Unreal in 1997 at Activision. We were thinking about using it for an upcoming game. Even then it seemed like a revolutionary engine. It's funny in retrospect because as I recall the big issue was we didn't trust them to finish because their previous game was like "Jazz Jackrabbit" or something like that.
I'm glad they're getting funds, but they're from a company trying to add NFTs to games, which at best is distasteful. Now that I think of it, this seems like a mixed bag - they could have refused and took a stand, if they had cared about this issue, which they may not.
Godot gets a lot of money from shitty game developers/publishers that specialize in mobile gambling games etc. This seems to have had some impact on the engine’s feature set, as the wiki has pages/guides specifically about integrating mobile ads and in-app payments, along with script/asset encryption to enable developers to frustrate any attempts by their users to inspect/modify their games. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a “How to integrate NFTs and Blockchain transactions” wiki page pointing to some well-maintained plugin adding said integration in the near-to-mid future.
To be fair in-app payments are something absolutely every developer is interested in. As is code obfuscation as there's plenty of scammy publishers that copy games verbatim and then use fake reviews to push them above the legit games.
Microsoft has already sponsored Godot development multiple times
"Before starting, I would like to announce that this work is possible thanks to a generous donation of $24,000 by Microsoft"
https://godotengine.org/article/csharp-android-support
I have a litany of particular complaints about every game engine or framework I've ever tried, but Godot is by far my favorite option for 2D game development. The scene tree model works extremely well, and C# is pretty close to a first class citizen at this point.