editor itself an extended reality experience the thought process behind this decision is as follows working on xr games means constantly switching between desktop and wearing a headset and this will help alleviate part of that frustration the improved spatial awareness that xr offers makes authoring scenes and levels inside of xr an appealing choice the godot team believes that even level designers who are working on non-xr NUMBER_TOKENd games may find this workflow productive and as is tradition meta facebook has built itself quite a negative reputation and the godot community raised concerns over gado's involvement with them surely meta isn't funding godot out of the kindness of their hearts there has to be some sort of mutually beneficial reason for this grant as many of you know meta has been pumping millions of dollars into developing the oculus vr headset it is clear they believe in the future of vr and ar and are working to make that future a reality and if meta is in the business of selling vr headsets they need developers to make games and other software for those headsets unity and unreal already have robust solutions for vr and since meta is directly funding gado's xr development it must be because they believe godot has a real shot in competing with the other game engines in the future and to further put the community's mind at ease remy godot's project manager reassured the community by explaining in depth how this all works godot is a non-profit project that is given for free to the community however a core team that works full-time and part-time to develop the godot engine is paid through a combination of corporate sponsors and grants as well as user donations via godot's patreon in regards to grants the good team themselves reaches out to these companies and asks for support they write a work package that describes features they want to add to godot how they intend to get it done and how much it will cost if the company likes the plane and agrees with gadot's vision they give the grant the godot team used this method to secure grants from mozilla for the rendering web and networking functionality they did this with microsoft to give godot c sharp support they did this with epic for rendering and gd script work and of course they did this with facebook slash meta oculus for godot's xr support the godot team is always in the driver's seat they only work on features and improvements that they want to work on the companies do not dictate godot's future remy reassured the community by saying that you can't hire the godot project to work for you if a company were to approach them with a list of demands and a fat stack of cash they would redirect them to existing consulting companies that can implement things for them at a market appropriate rate and if a company did submit a contribution on github all contributions are reviewed to ensure quality that they align with godot's vision and that they are not too vendor-specific overall i trust the current godot dev team in leading the godot project in the right direction they wouldn't have been able to bring the engine where it is today without a high level of competency with the current leadership team i believe godot will continue to grow and evolve into a tool that every game developer seriously considers for their projects by the way
START_SPONSOR_TOKEN projects by the way END_SPONSOR_TOKEN