How does Godot make money?

[An Easy Target]

I realize this might sound cheesy, but I'll say it anyway: In my opinion it merits serious commendation when a person and/or people are willing to publish a powerful resource- obviously in this case Godot- for public use without necessarily asking for a dime up front.

Also in my opinion folks who do this deserve support- and anyway, I'm curious about how an organization publishing a free resource can keep its doors open. I hope you don't mind if I open up by asking how Godot - and her developers - manage to do so sustainably.

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Disclaimer; I have yet to use Godot, I have only seen and heard of it, and I wound up adding it to my Steam Library at some point, but have never once even opened it. There may be some blaring obvious neon sign answering this question that I just haven't seen yet, so apologies to anyone annoyed in that case by my asking after an obvious answer.

[Matt [Linux]]

people support them through Patreon. and they also get grants. they had a large one last year from Epic Games.

if you go to their website, you will see a progress bar in the top left corner saying how much they are getting in donations every month.

https://godotengine.org/

[Akien]

First answer says most of it already, but I'll confirm :)

Godot is a not-for-profit and all funding we get goes 100% to cover development cost. We typically hire existing core contributors to fill the most needed positions (e.g. to work full time on rendering, networking, or in my case project management).

Funding comes from user donations (most of them through Patreon, though it's also possible to donate through PayPal), corporate sponsorships (you can see the "Platinum" sponsors on the splash screen, and there's a few more tiers who also have their logo on the Godot website), and grants (we've received significant grants from Epic, Facebook/Oculus and Kefir in the past 18 months).

And that's it. Recent grants have enabled us to hire more people to speed up the development of Godot 4.0, but since they're one-time things, they don't offer a guarantee of sustainable income for coming years, so we still need to grow our donations and sponsorship income (more predictable) to sustain the current team in 2022+ (and eventually grow further if we can afford it).