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Note that it seems this will only be free & open source initially, but will probably move to a paid model on release. W4 is a for-profit company, after all.
Do you have any source for this speculation? There is no reason to close the source later even if it is made by a for-profit company. My guess would be that they are planning to offer it as a SaaS, given that it is AGPL licensed.
AGPL release
Cloud page explicitly mentions and links Self-Hosting
k8s folder in repository
They seemingly intend to offer cloud hosting with SDK integration, while also allowing to setup your own Kubernetes cluster.
There's no sign of them maybe revoking open source. Quite the contrary.
I had a look at the source, but this seems like a really complex setup. Maybe good for scaling if your game is a viral hit, but for 99% of all games it seems total overkill and way to complex. I guess that is another way to make something open-source but also make it unrealistic that anyone else will ever use it 😒
I think Nakama also has a Godot integration and that is probably a bit easier to set up.
If you want to invite large scale games you gotta support them. There’s a reason it’s not built into the editor, there’s already easier networking features for everyone else.
Is it confirmed this will move to paid-only/closed source? Theoretically W4 could still make the software available while charging for hosting and using with their managed servers?
OP speculation. I don't see them closing it off after an open source release, under AGPL, and linking self-hosting as an alternative on their cloud offer page.
Besides being open source, is this a better solution than anything Steam provides? I understand this will likely work better with Godot out of the box, but considering all the resources Valve gives to developers I'm hesitant
It's hard to say given that this is brand new, but tighter integration with Godot is a boon. They're offering on-demand server access, with instances running Godot for access to the high-level network API. Steam is built around either P2P or dedicated servers, not on-demand cloud servers like this. In theory you might be able to set something like this up with the Steam API, but you'd need a devops team to set up and maintain it. They're offering API support+cloud from the same company, which if they're any good is potentially valuable to customers. Even if you just use their code, that's a head start.
Looks like they also support P2P, but it seems like their big offering is their server architecture.
Who knows how well they can deliver on those promises. A more concrete offering is that if you use the Steam API, you're locked to Steam, while in theory this works wherever Godot works.
Steam only works on steam while this allows full crossplay similar to Nakama or the Epic Online Services.