[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?

[sirtaj]

I don't think that violates the GPL, it does only if you distribute the modified version without also providing the source changes.