Defold is a free to use, source available, game engine with a developer-friendly license. Defold is owned and developed by the Defold Foundation.
Defold is a source available game engine with a developer-friendly license derived from the popular Apache 2.0 License. The license grants you the freedom to develop games without worrying about licensing fees or royalties.
Read the licenseDefold is designed to be easily expanded with additional functionality and features through extensions. A large selection of official and community developed open source extensions are available through the Asset Portal.
Asset PortalAs a software foundation we rely on community donations and corporate partnerships to ensure an active ownership and long term sustainability. We invite you to make one-time or monthly donations to support Defold.
Learn more & DonateAs a free to use, source available, project Defold accepts community contributions to any part of the product, including, but not limited to, the engine, editor, extensions and documentation. The source code is available on GitHub.
How to contributeDefold is, and will always remain, completely free to use. Defold will never change into a subscription model, request royalty payments, introduce licensing fees or in other ways charge for access to the main product. We can say this with absolute certainty as it is clearly stated in the objectives of the foundation that Defold must be made available for free and that it may not be commercialised. The objectives are protected by Swedish foundation law and cannot be changed. Learn more about the foundation.
Do you have a question that isn't answered here? Please ask us and we will do our best to answer!
A: No, Defold has been donated to the Defold Foundation. King holds a single seat on the Defold board but has no direct influence on the future of Defold.
A: No, King is still using Defold for selected live games.
A: Defold is still being worked on by members of the Defold team. The team has plans to grow during 2020 but as with any open project it will also to some extent rely on community contributions. Learn more about how to contribute here.
A: King made a generous donation when the Defold Foundation was created. Defold will fund continued development from the initial donation and through community donations and corporate partnership deals. Learn more about how to donate.
A: No. We will never compromise on code quality. We will only accept contributions that have been reviewed by the team, and we will impose the same high standards on community contributions as contributions made by the core team. Learn more about how to contribute here.
A: Yes. The Defold Foundation will always focus on maintaining a stable and up to date engine. The main responsibility of keeping the engine and editor updated falls on the Defold Foundation, but we may from time to time ask for help from the community.
A: No. We believe the native extension build servers to be such an integral part of the Defold product offering that they should remain available as a free service to our users. And now that the build server source code is available anyone is free to set up and run their own server, either locally or as a public or private server.
A: Yes, the Defold Foundation will maintain a public roadmap on GitHub
A: This is definitely something we want to happen. Earlier this year we communicated the high level roadmap for 2020 and we will plan our work based on this roadmap. But since the roadmap is defined on a high level there is a possibility for the community to influence the work. With reported issues, feature requests and task now being public on GitHub it will be possible for the community to upvote items they feel are important, and we will take the votes into account when we plan our work.
A: We currently have the Asset Portal where users can share content with the community. We do not have any plans to create a marketplace where assets can be sold / bought. You are however free to use the Asset Portal to market your content and explain how the content can be purchased.
A: Defold is released under a developer-friendly license derived from the popular Apache 2.0 License. The license grants you the freedom to develop games without worrying about paying licensing fees or royalties on your earnings. Learn more about the license here.
A: Yes, absolutely! Defold is much more future proof this way. The fact that Defold source code is available will allow anyone to improve Defold by fixing bugs, updating it with new features or patching it to work with new operating system updates without being dependent on another company to do the work.
A: All of it. The engine and editor source code is available from this GitHub repository. The native extension build server is available from this GitHub repository. Extensions and other miscellaneous projects are also open sourced on GitHub.
A: The basic information about why and how Defold source code is available can be found on our webpage. The daily development process can be followed on GitHub. To participate in source code discussions please join the Source Code section of our forum.
A: The definition of the term Open Source is heavily debated. The Open Source Initiative has created a definition of the term Open Source where it must be possible to commercialise the source code. The Defold Foundation has made the decision to prevent commercialisation of the game engine and editor (the Game Engine Product). We want Defold to always be free to use! (You can of course still sell your games and plugins and you can modify the engine as much as you like).
A: Fantastic! Learn more about how to contribute here.
A: You don't need to know C/C++ or Clojure to help out. We would be thrilled if we received contributions to our documentation, examples and tutorials. Learn more about how to contribute here.
A: No. The Defold Foundation will have a team of developers working on the engine, but the team will initially be smaller. We believe that some members from our community would be interested in contributing.
A: Not initially. We want the funding we have to last for as long as possible and we don't want to hire more developers until we know we have enough donations and money from corporate sponsorships to support more people.
A: Yes, absolutely. We accept donations via Patreon, PayPal and GitHub Sponsors. Learn more about how to donate.
A: We have not focused on user growth in previous years. Despite this the Defold community has grown year over year, a fact which we are very proud of. We will work actively to grow the Defold community in 2020 to better sustain Defold as an open project. We do believe that the move to make the source code for Defold available and open to contributions will attract new developers and we hope that some of those developers would also be interested in contributing.
Do you have a question that isn't answered here? Please ask us and we will do our best to answer!