One of the big winners of the Unity debacle is the free and open source Godot Engine, which has seen its funding soar to a much more impressive level as Unity basically gave them free advertising. Certainly helps that Godot ended up launching their new funding platform on the same day Unity announced their hated Runtime Fee system.
Initially when the Godot developers announced their new funding platform they only had around €25K per month from 438 members. This has now exploded up to €50,323 per month from 1,458 members. A much better and more sustainable amount considering they’re building an entire game engine.
This isn’t that strange for a number of open source projects. I don’t know Godot’s specifics, but lots of folks are willing to toss a few bucks via patreon or other sources. They keep a list of donors who don’t mind being named in the source code, and it includes a few companies that make monthly donations. I’m sure they get a number of grants like this one from Epic.
There’s a number of mastodon servers where people pay donate monthly to them.
Man People can be so awesome. All the Bad news makes me forget that way to often