This week, Godot Foundation executive director Emilio Coppola outlines avenues for the freeware engine's growth, forthcoming console integration, and why AI isn't likely to be incorporated into the project any time soon.

Next, we talk to Jackbox Games CEO Mike Bilder about the company's robust trajectory, between its annual Party Packs and its first foray into publishing with Toot Games' My Arms Are Longer Now. 

Emilio Coppola, executive director of the Godot Foundation, brought an unusual combination of experience in teaching, digital marketing for non-profits and community activism to the job of managing the open-source game engine Godot. But that philosophy runs through everything the Foundation does, and it's increasingly attracting attention far beyond the indie scene on which Godot was built. 

The Godot Foundation operates on a stunningly modest headcount considering the many thousands of people that use its product (the exact number of users is unknown, although the number of Steam games created using Godot has roughly doubled every year since 2023 to nearly 3,000 last year, and the engine is second only to Unity in popularity on Itch.io). Staff fluctuates between 12 and 20 people – all contractors, including Coppola himself – and funding allocation is stark.

"Ninety per cent of the budget goes towards paying developers that are working on the game engine," he says. "Then there are people like me, a project manager who's not programming, and some moderation people."

The recently launched Godot asset store has added one more: a dedicated reviewer for submissions.

Funding splits approximately 50/50 between individual donations and corporate contributions. Some corporate support does not appear in that figure at all.

"Companies might give us a developer to work on something," says Coppola. "We're not paying their salary, but they're more or less doing things we need."

Coppola is candid about the intention behind keeping corporate influence at arm's length: "We want to keep it better for the users. If the users are the main shareholders, then we keep improving it mostly for them."

Roadmap decisions follow the same logic. Features are proposed publicly through a community repository, assessed for overall utility, built and reviewed – a slow process by commercial standards but a system designed to ensure that every addition serves the majority. 

"It's never that we decide, 'This is very important and we're going to do it', and then force everybody [to accept it]. It's coming from the bottom up."

While the entire Godot project remains resolutely community-led, the Unity runtime fee crisis of late 2023 – which saw the competing engine maker try to charge developers a fee per game installation beyond certain thresholds – remains a clear inflection point. Larger teams began adopting Godot, which has always been completely free for commercial use, in greater numbers.

"At the beginning, they were a bit green, because most of our users up until then were very small teams. But we've seen more studios using it, and they were very quickly finding things that we could improve. Over the last year specifically, we've been doing a lot of those improvements for bigger teams."

Triple-A has a more ambivalent relationship with Godot. The engine is being used by some very large teams, and Second Dinner, the studio behind Marvel Snap, has worked with contractors to build Godot-based tooling. But Coppola is wary of actively chasing that market.

"I personally don't want to become a triple-A engine, because that means different priorities," he says.

"It's a double-edged sword. People do want us to say, 'This super-big game is made with Godot', but if the studio is not doing a great job, then the engine gets blamed. Like, going to Unreal, a lot of people are blaming Unreal for reasons that are not specifically Unreal's fault."

He points to a broader consolidation problem he finds troubling.

"I know that some bigger studios, like CD Projekt Red, were making their own technology and now they've decided to move to Unreal. It's good for their spreadsheets, but it's a bit sad that this is kind of centralising too much into these big engines."

However, on console support – an area in which Godot has experienced friction due to the engine's open-source nature – user demand has forced the Foundation to integrate with platform holders. "We know it's something very important to our users," Coppola says. "We're exploring which ways we can address this from the Foundation. There's a lot I cannot say at the moment, but it's something we're interested in solving."

While focus on scalability and platform compatibility is ongoing, AI isn't something Godot is going to be quick to integrate. AI-created submissions, for example, have caused a headache for the Foundation.

"There's a lot of value in having a GitHub profile that shows contributions to open-source projects," Coppola says. "So people are sending a lot of contributions to many projects without actually checking if the code works. It's adding a lot of work to us, reviewing and trying to make sense of [whether or not submissions were created by] AI or a human. If it were solving an issue, it wouldn't matter who made it, but most of the time they're not solving any issue."

He's largely unconvinced by AI in general, especially in light of Unity's prompt-based game-creation tools shown at GDC this year, noting that the vast majority of Godot's community simply doesn't want it integrated into the engine.

"It's kind of amazing to see how much FOMO there is in the industry," he says. "But I haven't seen anything that's really making things better. If you do have a theoretical 'make a game' button, why would you sell it? You would be flooding all the stores with games. The fact that they're trying to sell that means it doesn't work."

More strategically significant, in Coppola's view, is Godot's long-standing commitment to running on low-end hardware, a design choice that looks extremely prescient in light of extreme rises in memory costs since the end of 2024.

"We've always been very focused on running on very low-end hardware and being as tiny as possible, which has been very good for many communities in the global south who need that software to run on older hardware. But now we're seeing that globally. The shift in the industry is not going into more and more graphics, but rather, 'This is the hardware we have until prices go back to normal'."

Godot's asset store – still in beta – is the Foundation's clearest medium-term bet on strengthening Godot's unfailingly open-source offering.

"Hopefully, with the new asset store, we'll see more people engaged not only in making games but also in the things around it," says Coppola. "Right now, for many other engines, you get companies providing services to game developers. Many of them are interested in jumping on board with Godot, but they don't see how they can fit in the picture. Hopefully, that will be easier."

While it would be easy to scoff at the idea of a team of 15 contractors colouring that picture while serving an explosively expanding community, Godot's success, one built on community formation and a total commitment to shareware development, suggests that practically anything is possible. One thing's for certain: we're all going to be hearing a lot more of Godot in videogame development in the coming years.

Over the past month or so, Jackbox Games consecutively announced its 12th Party Pack and its first externally developed title, My Arms Are Longer Now. Both announcements were clear indicators of the firm's priorities: continuing to expand the reach of its immensely popular party games, and making a foray into publishing. 

Jackbox has been around for several decades, with origins in the '90s as Jellyvision Games, but it's fair to say that the COVID-19 pandemic is what truly propelled it into the mainstream.  

"We had already launched a handful of Party Packs but during that time we suddenly became a household name," Mike Bilder – Jackbox's CEO for the past 17 years – recalls. "Non-gamers were playing, happy hours at work and families trying to connect during quarantine… We really exploded in popularity."

While the industry is still recovering from post-COVID corrections following that explosive growth, Jackbox has had the good fortune of "continually being profitable and successful" since, Bilder says. The company now employs over 90 people.

"We've never had any layoffs. We have continued to grow at a steady pace, hiring a handful of people every year. It's been a tricky one to watch as a bystander, seeing friends downsizing post-COVID, but Jackbox has been very stable. We try not to overextend ourselves."

Jackbox Games releases the occasional standalone game, "either for customer demand or if there's an interesting opportunity with that IP," Bilder says. For instance, Trivia Murder Party 3 is due this year. But it's otherwise a well-oiled machine, releasing a new Party Pack every year.

"It can be seen as aggressive in that we've got about a year to make all these games, but I think that timeframe also helps keep constraints around what we're building and how we're building it. We could easily take two, three years to make some much larger game. I'm not sure that's what our consumer is looking for. Our party games are typically 15 to 20 minutes [in duration] – we offer a pack so there's a variety. The idea is that there's something for everybody, and that strategy has served us well."

Despite Jackbox's successes, the party-game market is not an easy one to occupy. Between a worsening attention economy and new contenders popping up regularly, staying relevant and on top of people's minds is a continuous challenge. 

"There's tons of competition, and there's a consumer that changes all the time," Bilder acknowledges. "We're on the 12th iteration in this franchise. We've got a new generation of people playing. Our core demographic hasn't changed much, so people come in and maybe graduate out as they get older. Our games are typically humour and pop culture-based, and so we have to appeal generationally to different audiences. We do that by [continually] working with different writers and comedy folks. We don't always get it right, but that's how we try to stay relevant.

"The other thing that's interesting about our games is: we are videogames, but I don't really consider triple-A games and hardcore console games to be our competition. Those compete with each other – they fulfil their own kind of need for a user. Our competition is the couple hours at a social gathering where people might otherwise play a board game or a parlour game. That's really our audience.

"A lot of our strategy over the years has been platform expansion. How do we get in front of more casual users? If you own a PlayStation or Xbox, you know about us, because we've made games for so long, and those are core platforms for us, but how do we get to that household that doesn't own that kind of platform and would love our games?" 

This is why Jackbox Games recently partnered with Netflix to release The Jackbox Party Essentials for the subscription platform. Jackbox is also working towards launching its own game-streaming service this year. Both moves follow the same business rationale: reducing friction between games and potential players. 

"It's a way to get into households that don't have gaming hardware, but they might have smart TVs. If there's a Jackbox app, it allows you now to casually play with your friends and family without needing controllers… We think there's real opportunity there to reach a whole new swathe of consumers.

"Our goal is not to replace your console. Our plan is to just be ubiquitous and try to be everywhere there are platforms that can play our games. But if you aren't savvy and don't want to hook a controller up to a TV, having a streaming service on major televisions, I think, is a really convenient way for people to get there."

When it comes to publishing, Bilder tells us Jackbox had been discussing the move internally for the past couple of years before making the jump. This is a way for the company to continue to grow without becoming its own worst enemy.  

"We produce [and publish] our own games – we can do more of that, but at some point we start to compete with ourselves. If we did two Party Packs a year, and suddenly there's ten party games from Jackbox every year, we're cannibalising our own market. So that isn't a great strategy for us. We could internally make completely different games but, strategically, I'm not sure that's the best fit for us either. So we want to stay in the wheelhouse of what we're known for and what we're good at, and quite frankly, what we enjoy making. But expand that." 

Toot Games's stealth-comedy title My Arms Are Longer Now, in which you play a long-armed thief, certainly feels like it belongs under the Jackbox umbrella. Rooted in improv comedy, the game reminded Jackbox of Thank Goodness You're Here and Untitled Goose Game, two staples of the humour genre. 

Bilder adds that he also remembers Jackbox once being a "struggling, unfunded developer" that had "a few near-death experiences along the way." So there's also definitely a desire to give back and help the next generation of developers. 

"We're going to try and find experiences that our audience would really enjoy – that's tangential to what we do. My Arms Are Longer Now is just the first one, and as we look into next year and the year beyond that, we've got an interesting lineup that folks will enjoy, hopefully."

SOCIAL COMMENTARY

Highlights from industry chat channels

Edge 424, a special edition looking at the world of AI in game development, is in shops now, and also available to buy here. If you haven't picked it up yet, here are some samples of what you'll find inside: 

"The nerdy side of me goes: 'Oh, wow, this is quite cool'. But the more ethical and the more creative and artistic side of me goes: 'This is fucking insane'."
Composer Joris de Man joins us to pick through the minefield that is generative AI.

"Most people will pitch people fighting each other. We are: 'Can we make people love each other?'"
Thatgamecompany's Jenova Chen identifies one of the characteristics that makes his studio different. 

"At the end of 2024, having had our heads down for the last four years, we looked up and were like, 'Oh my god, what's going on?'"
Sunset Visitor's Remy Siu recalls the point of inspiration for the studio's new game, the AI-centred Prove You’re Human.

"We'll do a system, it'll be really in-depth and interesting, but maybe doesn't work how we intended. We don't forget it’s there. We make a mental note, and in the future, when there's a hole we need to fill, we can just pull that shit back out."
In The Making Of Mewgenics, Edmund McMillen tells us why it's important to hold on to ideas rather than simply toss them in the bin. 

"Its vast history and story is just such a rich playground for any fantasy or quest, or whatever kind of journey you want to take someone on."
Saber's Oliver Hollis-Leick has an answer to our question: 'Why are there so many Warhammer games?'

"I've read accounts of what Pong meant to people at the time, but I've never been able to feel that while playing it myself – until encountering it in the framing of Godliman's diorama."
A miniaturised Pong gives Alex Spencer a new way of appreciating Atari's landmark game.

We'll be back next week. In the meantime, don't forget to share your feedback with us by email ([email protected]), and follow us via Bluesky and LinkedIn.