- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming
- [email protected]
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
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.
Steamworks allows you to distribute dedicated server release.
The W4 cloud allows you to manage your dedicated server instances (fleet) beyond dedicated server release distribution.
The release distribution/upload seems to happen within the Godot editor.