Defold: cross-platform game engine
160 comments
·April 18, 2025evv
Tepix
I agree that the license looks fair. Not everything has to be OSI-compliant open source. They even support WASM!
executesorder66
> You can make proprietary changes to the engine without releasing them (unlike GPL).
Why is that a good thing?
>You can freely monetize games built with the engine,
You'd also be able to do the same if it had a GPL license
>and they make some assurances that there won't be a bait-and-switch.
If it was licensed under a GPL license you wouldn't need to rely on "some assurances"
Ethee
Consider the space we're in. For game development you're going to have a lot of developers with a lot of different ideas about how to make a game, all utilizing the same engine. If the engine doesn't come with a feature I need, I'll probably have to code it myself, but seeing as the whole purpose of me making this feature is for my game, then it makes sense that I should be able to keep my game's feature private/proprietary without the need to push that feature back to engine which might not even want my feature to begin with. This is why GPL is not a good choice for game engines.
Arelius
More importantly, a successful game is likely to need porting to proprietary platforms, with APIs behind restrictive NDAs.
Honestly, not great, but that's the world we live in.
badsectoracula
GPL doesn't require you to push a feature/change/etc back to the engine devs, it only requires you to make it available to others. You can just keep your changes in a ZIP file alongside your game's data - which is what a bunch of games built on the GPL releases of id Tech already do.
all2
>> You can make proprietary changes to the engine without releasing them (unlike GPL). > Why is that a good thing?
Game dev at the top tiers is an arms race. Being able to do proprietary things is attractive to big players.
>> and they make some assurances that there won't be a bait-and-switch.
> If it was licensed under a GPL license you wouldn't need to rely on "some assurances"
Multiple projects have gone closed-source from open source. Assurances are a nice thing to have (but certainly no guarantee).
executesorder66
> Game dev at the top tiers is an arms race. Being able to do proprietary things is attractive to big players.
Yeah, so I don't see how helping out the big players and not everyone else is a good thing.
>Multiple projects have gone closed-source from open source. Assurances are a nice thing to have (but certainly no guarantee).
Yeah but the open source ones ARE guaranteed. Even if they later become closed source, the code up till that point will remain open source forever. So it is guaranteed whereas "some assurances" mean nothing.
nurettin
>> You can make proprietary changes to the engine without releasing them (unlike GPL).
> Why is that a good thing?
Instead of writing an internal project from scratch, you modify an existing project and tightly couple it with your internal process. What's wrong with that?
poulpy123
I like the licence, and it is for me open source in spirit if not in letter, but there is a case that could cause problems : what if you sell services for a closed source version of defold ?
simonbw
It specifically says you are not allowed to commercialize the engine or a derivative, so that sounds like something that is not intended to be allowed, though I feel like it might take a lawyer to decide whether or not that is technically allowed by the license.
frankvdwaal
You'd first have to make proprietary changes, which you are not allowed to release, and so there's nobody to sell those services to.
RandallBrown
> You are free to distribute original or modified (derivative) versions of Defold
You just don't have to release the code if you do change it.
Although I'm unsure if selling services on your modified game engine, that you released the source of, counts as commercialization.
null
echelon
This is an awesome license. More products should be source-available like this.
This is what sustainable "equitable open source" looks like. It keeps the team that built the product able to monetize, but it does so without harming or killing the community. The community has full access to the code and can modify it, make money from products made with it, and can presumably take over if the originating organization dies.
The company can choose which services to offer for free and which ones to charge a premium for. Cloud CI/builds and hosting seem like good monetization levers while leaving the engine and editor completely free of charge and open for development and modification. You can build a sustainable lifestyle business this way.
Database vendors should use licenses like this to prevent Amazon from stealing their work and bleeding their cash flow.
Redis and Elasticsearch should have done this before Amazon cloned their products, started making bank on managed versions, killed their monetization efforts, and turned their communities against them.
Matt Mullenweg should have done this instead of throwing a fit.
ilariel
At least they mention that it is source-available, but they still mix "open source" into the mix on their site.
It is a really nice and fair source-available license and there should be more of this, but a license like theirs also restricts what kind of software you can make in a rather harsh way.
Since you can't commercialise game engine products and they are defined in a broad way. You could land in legal issues. Game engine products are defined in the license as:
“Game Engine Product” shall mean software used for video game development. This includes both the content authoring software and the software used to show the created content.
IANAL, but map editors, modding tools and many other kind of tools that can be used for developing video games could be in violation of the license.
Since meaning of "commercialise" isn't being defined or narrowed in the license small creators using Patreon or the like while asking donations could be classified as a violation too.
PolCPP
The only options i see are:
- Give the modding tools for free with the game (like many games do anyway). You're commercializing the game no the modding tools - Make the tools defold-free ? So it reads the game data but its not defold. - Tools for free but charge for support/warranty?, Clause 9 lets you sell support/warranty; you just can’t charge for the software license itself.
bee_rider
It could be nice if they had some sort of easy approval process for small Patreon users to commercialize the building of tools for their platform.
Shorel
People don't have such hindsight. And we can't ask them to have it, as it is impossible to predict the future with such accuracy.
Without RMS swinging hard one way and without Amazon swinging hard the other way, we would not have this license.
It is because all of these shenanigans that we now kind of have a license that solves these issues, and surely when the landscape changes again, a new license scheme will be needed.
benoau
Really what it means is there is one entity entitled to monetize the project, so it will probably just die if their monetization ideas or execution are lacking or their enthusiasm wanes. GitHub is full of dead projects like this because monetizing software is hard, building important software is hard, and doing both is even harder. Open source should be funded, but this isn't an efficient way to do it.
Mullenweg, approximate net worth $400 million, should have thought long and hard 20 years ago if "a rising tide lifts all boats" allows for others to have boats, or just his. There should be a $billions ecosystem around WP even if Mullenweg doesn't get that money.
graemep
> Matt Mullenweg should have done this instead of throwing a fit
Not a choice he had. You cannot relicense GPL code line that. He would have had to write a new system from scratch instead of forking an existing one.
saghm
I thought that copyright holders could relicense code however they wanted? I don't think GPL or not is the issue, but whether or not all third-party contributors have assigned the copyright of their contributions to the party trying to relicense. My understanding is that this is often difficult or even impossible in practice to obtain after the fact codebases with large numbers of contributors over the years if signing something ahead of time wasnt't a requirement previously, and I don't have any insight into whether Wordpress is in this situation or not, but I don't think whether the code is GPL or not is relevant to this
selfselfgo
[dead]
progbits
Major props to them for not only calling it "source available" (and not trying to misuse "open source" like so many do), but also for highlighting the additions to their Apache-based license: https://defold.com/license/
progbits
IANAL but seems like the only addition is preventing you from selling a game engine based on it. So you can sell a game, but not an engine. I wonder where a game with built-in editor ranks.
Seems fair, but sadly not OSS. I wonder why they think it's necessary?
riidom
I don't know what they think, but I think it is not necessary. Let's draw a comparison to Blender here. Blender is GPL, and there is a long history of questionable projects that relabel Blender and try to sell it.
There is the requirement to make the source code available (GPL), as far as I am informed, you can sort of get around this, by delivering the source code with the download, but then "don't advertise" it, as in hide it as much as possible without getting in legal trouble.
(My information may be a bit outdated here) Afaik, the Blender Foundation doesn't even bother to shut these projects down (they do get frequently informed about it, when people discover it).
And this even given the fact, that they would be easy to shut down. The reason for this, is used media in advertising. If you want to sell your 3D package, you need to show some impressive artwork which was created with said project.
Problem is, the images/animations these projects show off on their websites are a) not created with said Blender reskin, but usually in Blender itself and b) they usually don't have permission from the artists.
So even having this quite comfortable handle, BF usually don't care. Which tells a lot about the impact of such copycats.
My takeaway from all this is, the situation would pan out pretty similar for Defold, and they should just dare it and monitor the landscape.
palunon
Wouldn't the artists be the ones to have standing, instead of the Blender Foundation?
auggierose
Because they don't want somebody else to sell their game engine? It's pretty clear, isn't it?
rowls66
Why would anyone buy their game engine when it is available for free? Seems like a solution for a problem that doesn't/won't exist.
Zambyte
That doesn't answer the question of why.
Tepix
> Seems fair, but sadly not OSS.
Which of their license changes makes you feel sad and why? Were you planning to sell their editor?
rpdillon
The current license makes it unclear whether it would be a violation to distribute a commercial game that has a built-in map editor.
japhib
> I wonder where a game with built-in editor ranks
The website-summarized version of the license says:
> You can not commercialise original or modified (derivative) versions of the Defold editor and/or engine
It sounds like this would only be a problem if you're literally shipping a modified version of Defold. No game with any kind of financial incentive does this for a built-in map or mod editor, because it would make it incredibly easy for other people to then sell a modified version of their entire game.
It's kind of like if Apple made the Xcode source available, and then said "hey you can't monetize a modified version of Xcode." No one is going to ship their app's entire Xcode project to players just so the players can make a custom map.
The normal way for games to do this is to implement a brand-new map-editing UI inside Defold (or Xcode, Unity, Godot, etc.) that spits out custom maps in the exact data format that the game can parse.
chucklenorris
I remember this was initially developed at king games (candycrush saga authors) before they got acquired. Probably that's the reason for the weird licensing model
britzl
Yes, you are correct. An MIT license was preferred by the Defold team but the modified Apache license was what was decided upon in the end.
seba_dos1
> (and not trying to misuse "open source" like so many do)
They only stopped because of the backlash they received when they tried to. Their initial announcement was about "Defold becoming open source".
britzl
The Defold Foundation immediately stopped calling Defold open-source when it was pointed out that the license was in conflict with the OSI definition.
https://defold.com/2020/05/20/Some-thoughts-on-the-open-sour...
tunaoftheland
I've had a soft spot for defold, partly because they're unique in the gamedev space. For example, the GUI editor that is built-in is done in Clojure! https://github.com/defold/defold/tree/dev/editor (cljfx for the GUI, I am rooting for seesaw though :))
From what I understand it emerged from a gamedev studio from Sweden (King or something?) so there's commercial release pedigree there. I believe their console platform build/release tooling does cost money for game devs because the platform SDKs themselves impose restrictions. But I get the impression that defold as org does seem to put in earnest effort to be fair to game devs with licensing, etc. like others mentioned here.
mtnygard
It’s cool to see this mentioned. I worked on the editor back in the day. It’s actually the second IDE for Defold. The original one that we replaced was built on Eclipse.
A team of about 6 people replaced the IDE core and built a dozen tools over a year.
It was a fun project. Not many people can say they built a desktop gui with Clojure!
Cthulhu_
If it is King, then it's got a huge (financial) backer; King is one of the most profitable game publishers thanks to e.g. Candy Crush that made their revenue jump from $62 million in 2011 to $1.88 billion in 2013. It was bought in 2016 by Activision Blizzard, which in turn was acquired by Microsoft in 2023.
Ah, the wiki page also mentions the Defold engine, which was first developed in 2007 and acquired by King in 2013, then opened to its current licensing model in 2016.
croes
Given the addictive nature of Candy Crush it’s a little bit like a drug lord building a hospital.
Candy Crush is less deadly than drugs, but a game engine is less useful than a hospital
rockyj
Defold has been there for a while, not sure of why this in on the front page right now. Anyways, Defold is good, the community, docs etc. are on the lower side as compared to Godot.
The other options include MonoGame https://monogame.net/ (Stardew Valley was written in it) and of-course the biggies like Unity or Unreal. A lot depends on how much investment in learning one wants to make, what is the feature set one is looking for, the trade-offs or platforms one wants to keep in mind and which programming language / style one want to use.
croes
Because this story about Lua made the front page and they use Defold
hokumguru
I cannot stress enough how much I love Monogame. Its been a joy to work with.
bentt
I remember when Unity first appeared and what it felt like to read its materials, its pitch. It was like... whoa, this might actually be something.
This feels similar. Sometimes you can just tell by the communications and the spirit of the language that the team has the goods.
The fact that they have such comprehensive multiplatform export right now is big. One of Godot's biggest hurdles has been console support.
My ONLY beef, from what I saw, was that it was Lua only. If it was C# I would have been more excited. But at least it's not a full C++ recompile like SOME engines. :)
tapoxi
Godot does support consoles, they just choose to move that to third parties. There's community Switch support if you're a registered Switch developer, and W4 Games licenses export plugins.
One of the reasons for this is because console plugins can't be developed in the open like the rest of the engine, because the console SDKs are behind NDAs. It's a pretty ridiculous holdover from when consoles were more specialized.
saejox
i wish people would stop mentioning W4 Games as a porting option. their lowest revenue tier costs $2000 a year. most indie games sell a few hundred copies.
japhib
You'd be hard pressed to find console support for much less than that - compare it with Unity or GameMaker's console support tier and you'll find it's pretty similar.
It can take hundreds of dev-hours to port your engine to consoles yourself, so having another company handle it for you, for all 3 consoles, for only $2000 is a pretty good deal!
tapoxi
Most indie games sell on Steam/Steam Deck first and port to consoles later, usually after being picked up by an indie publisher.
The $2000 is also to port to all three console platforms, it's $800 per. This makes it feasible to say, only target PlayStation with W4 and use the community Switch port.
bentt
Yeah I really like Godot and you're right, the third parties are working hard on that front. It's been a trial for them though.
I guess the roots with King have made things easier for Defold?
neonsunset
That third party is owned by Godot's leadership and management. Your Godot contributions go towards their pockets.
maheart
Here's a list of other 3rd party porters: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/co... Stop spreading FUD. It's FOSS. It's like saying contributing to systemd lines the pockets of Red Hat.
xandrius
Exactly, read Lua and got out instantly.
Games are complicated beasts, something along the lines of C# help massively the development and the avoidance of bugs.
Python, <X>Script and Lua are not languages I'd wish to switch to from the coziness of C#. I'd consider Go or Java (although not as hip as it used to be).
japhib
If you just want static typing, you can write Typescript and compile to Lua: https://typescripttolua.github.io/
anentropic
japhib
They recently added C# support: https://forum.defold.com/t/defold-c-support/79479
britzl
C# support is still experimental and under development, but it is at least ready for testing for those that are curious. Note that it is C# with Native AOT so it's compilation and linking involved, not "scripting and hotreload".
magicalhippo
Related ongoing submission here[1], about a game with 60k LOC of Lua using this engine.
nunodonato
I'd love to see a more in-depth comparison in terms of features with Godot. Seems the latter is much more advanced, at least in 3d capabitilies.
vunderba
Defold isn't really intended for 3D games at all. It's got a much stronger focus on 2D mobile/web.
britzl
Not entirely true, but sure, there are fewer bells and whistles in Defold compares to Unity, Unreal and Godot when it comes to 3D.
Here's a recently released 3D game made with Defold: https://forum.defold.com/t/cashchubbies-island/78183/22
Ralfp
I’ve used to follow this few years ago. This is a game engine created by King that they then set free after deinvesting from it themselves.
2mlWQbCK
How does it compare to Löve 2D, other than shipping with a IDE? Looks like Defold supports more platforms, but I guess there are some strings attached since packaging games for various consoles usually come with very non-open dependencies.
tombert
Noticed it wasn't on Nixpkgs, so... https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/399843
synergy20
is Teal widely used? https://github.com/teal-language/tl
Teal to lua is what typescript to javascript
hombre_fatal
No. But I've used it for Pico-8 development. I had to write a tool that turned it into mygame.tl into a mygame.p8 cart on save though.
japhib
I tried to use Teal before and had some issues even getting it to compile ... but the Lua language server actually has pretty good type checking.
Another option is https://typescripttolua.github.io/
debugnik
No, but Luau (which is more of a fork) from the Roblox studio is seeing growing adoption. Notably, it was used for Alan Wake 2.
imzadi
I was curious about VR development, and after reading this, I'm still not sure: https://forum.defold.com/t/official-refold-stance-on-vision-...
They have gone with an interesting licensing solution here. I really appreciate that it is labeled as a source-available license instead of Open Source.
https://defold.com/license/
You can make proprietary changes to the engine without releasing them (unlike GPL). You can freely monetize games built with the engine, and they make some assurances that there won't be a bait-and-switch.
And finally, the reason why this is not Apache 2.0- you cannot monetize (forks of) the game engine itself.
This seems fair and carefully considered. Kudos to the team!