- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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
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.