Thanks to donations from members of Valve's Steam Workshop two programmers will be working half-time on Blender to improve it for game artists and modders.

Blender Foundation has just signed a contract with Dalai Felinto and Bastien Montagne who for the next 6 months will be working on integration of Blender into game development and modding pipelines.

Interestingly enough, this coincides with recent initiative to distribute Blender in the Steam Workshop. Either way, the amount of donations to enable this kind of development is quite impressive.

Dalai and Bastien will discuss changes with the gamedev community, come up with a prioritized list of features to implement, then put it for review by all of the Blender community, and finally do the actual programming. You can get a pretty good idea about the nature of possible changes from this email sent by a game artist who already uses Blender for source modding.

It's entirely possible that the foundation will continue getting this kind of income from members of the Steam Workshop. In that case more developers could be hired, and topics like proposed dramatic game engine changes could become a subject of paid development.