After two years of development, W4 Games is proud to announce the first beta release of W4 Cloud, our open-source backend for online and multiplayer games optimized for the Godot Engine.

W4 Cloud has been built around the same concepts as the Godot Engine: simplicity and flexibility.

As part of our commitment to open-source, we have made the initial public release available under the GNU AGPLv3 license.

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.

Edit: Removed some speculation, I misunderstood the “initial public release” part and assumed later releases would not be foss

  • poVoq
    link
    fedilink
    193 months ago

    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.

  • @Kissaki
    link
    English
    11
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    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.

  • poVoq
    link
    fedilink
    83 months ago

    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.

    • Gamma
      link
      fedilink
      English
      8
      edit-2
      3 months ago

      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.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    73 months ago

    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?

    • @Kissaki
      link
      English
      53 months ago

      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.

  • kryllic
    link
    63 months ago

    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

    • Melmi
      link
      fedilink
      English
      73 months ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      53 months ago

      Steam only works on steam while this allows full crossplay similar to Nakama or the Epic Online Services.