What runs in the cloud, and what runs on your machine

Stage Engine is a desktop application for Mac and Windows, and it ships with Godot inside it. When you press play, the game starts on your machine, using your processor, your graphics card and your memory. There is no streaming, no remote rendering and no video feed coming back from a server.

This is the part people most often assume works the other way, because a lot of tools in this space do run the game elsewhere and send you a picture. That approach has real advantages, chiefly that it works on any machine. It also has a hard cost: your framerate is a shared resource, your input latency includes a round trip, and the size of world you can build is decided by whatever the provider is willing to pay for.

Running locally inverts all of that. A world with terrain, weather and a few hundred simulated characters is bounded by your hardware rather than by our infrastructure bill.

Director 1, which writes the GDScript for your game, runs over the network. So does asset generation, and so does world data such as terrain sources. These are the parts that genuinely need to be somewhere else, because they are large models and large datasets rather than something that fits on a laptop.

The consequence is direct and you should plan around it: you need an internet connection while you are building. There is no offline mode, no degraded mode and no cached fallback that lets you keep working on a train. If that is a blocker for you, it is better to know before you install anything.

The connection is not needed to play. Once the game exists, it runs on the bundled Godot with nothing phoning anywhere.

On your disk. What you build is a real Godot project in ordinary files, sitting in a directory on your own machine, not a record in a database you access through a browser.

This is the practical difference between a tool you use and a service you rent. Back it up how you like, copy it to another machine, keep it after you cancel a subscription. Godot is open source and free, so a project in Godot format does not stop being openable.

There is no cloud game building, no remote build queue and no server-side editor. The app on your machine is the whole editing surface.

The cost is that it is a download and it needs a real computer. It will not run on a phone, a tablet, or a managed machine you cannot install software on. Browser tools win on that point and there is no way around it.

What it buys is headroom and ownership. The game can be as heavy as your machine allows, the framerate is real, and the project is a thing you hold rather than a thing you access.

Pricing follows the same logic. Free to download with a free plan, Indie at $10 a month, Pro at $50. What those buy is more usage of the networked parts, since Director 1 and generation cost money per request. They do not buy a better engine, because the engine is on your machine and it is the same one for everybody.

A common question, since the project is local: what happens if you build on a desktop and want to continue on a laptop.

The answer is that the project is a directory of ordinary files and moving it is your call. Copy it, sync it with whatever you already use, or keep it in version control. Install the app on both machines and sign in with the same account.

What there is not is a hosted project that follows you automatically. That is the direct consequence of the project being yours rather than a row in our database, and it is the trade this whole page describes.

It also means a backup is your responsibility. Nobody is quietly keeping a copy of your project for you, so whatever you already use for the files you would hate to lose should cover this too, and it is worth setting up before you have four months in it rather than after. Two machines, two installs, one account, and the files wherever you decide to keep them: that is the whole arrangement, and it has the advantage of being something you can reason about.