W4 Games announces pricing model for console ports | Hacker News Reader

W4 Games announces pricing model for console ports

w4games.com

78 pointssbruchmann20 comments

Recent and related:

W4 Games raises $15M to drive video game development with Godot Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38580742 - Dec 2023 (85 comments)

The prices are quite reasonable! This will be a major step towards getting rid of Unity.

For small indie shops probably, for those that use Unity to full extent, there is still a long road ahead.

Successful indie games tend to be released on all major consoles, so call it $2k/year for a small team or $10k for a larger one.

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).

> At W4 Games, we are staunchly committed to open-source software, and our pricing model reflects this dedication. We provide full source code access for all tiers, empowering developers to customize and optimize our ports as they see fit.

Under what license terms?

From reading the FAQ it seems the terms are basically that you have to keep paying the license fee in order to release content updates for your games on platforms where you used any of their code to make the build. And since this is for the 3 major game console platforms, any code that touches the console SDKs is under the NDA you have to sign with the console platforms.

This looks like great news for Godot! From reading the article, though, I can't understand what "per year" means in terms of console ports. Surely they won't invalidate your port at the end of the year, right? Is it just that you don't receive updates after the year is up?

I think per year of use. I.e. if you want to publish updates for your game, you have to be paying for a license for that year.

Yeah that's the impression I got from the FAQ as well. You must be a current subscriber to have access to the latest commits from the repository, and you must also be a current subscriber at the time you release, and at the time you publish any content updates for your game. There does appear to be an exception for bugfix-only releases, assuming you can make them happen without the latest code from the W4 repository.

I very much appreciated the wording and tone of:

> 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.

Big red flag:

"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.

I don't think that is their intention but yeah they need to clarify publish as sell or the start of sale. Later in that answer <For non-content patches (with the exclusive intention of keeping the game compliant with the current SDKs), post-launch, no license is required. However, keep in mind you won’t have access to the repositories if you don’t have an active license.> would suggest continued sale without license is ok.

I'm not in the space at all, but from my naive reading it seems like for bigger outfits the success monkey—er, manager—would be a great deal at borrowing an engineer with deep technical knowledge of the platform to do your bidding and fix all kinds of things not really related to porting.

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.)

What does "Publisher/Porting house allowed" mean?

A publisher is a company that can help a developer handle things like marketing, support and other things. Basically the same as a book publisher not actually writing books, which is what authors do. Sometimes, the publisher and the developer is the same company, sometimes there is only the developer, and sometimes they are two different companies.

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.

OMG I wish this title were editiorized.

It's should really be mentioned they talking of Godot ports.

Editorializing is against the site guidelines

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Interesting I'd get downvoted for sharing this...

It's done all the time.

That doesn't mean anything. It's still against the rules for a good reason and shouldn't be encouraged.

The only relevant line in there is:

> 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

would both be clarifying modifications, not editorializing ones. All definitions of "editorialize" involve an opinion, and although it is possible to express an opinion via a cleverly chosen clarification, this is not one of those cases.

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.

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