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Comment by mmwon | Hacker News Reader

Great publicity for Godot which i believe will get as heavy and important as Blender.

"Godot does not officially support consoles (save for XBox One via UWP) currently.

The reasons for this are:

To develop for consoles, one must be licensed as a company. Godot, as an open source project, does not have such a legal figure.

Console SDKs are secret, and protected by non-disclosure agreements. Even if we could get access to them, we could not publish the code as open-source.

Consoles require specialized hardware to develop for, so regular individuals can’t create games for them anyway."

Copied from: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/conso...

And UWP on XBox is on its way out, as the XBox team made quite clear with the release of GDK.

I want to like Godot, I just dislike too many of the design choices. I don’t like the signal pattern at all. GDScript is fine for small games. C# integration is an afterthought and shows with the rough api; especially working with signals.

You still need to pay for a devkit even with Godot, and be on good terms with Sony, Nintendo, Google and Microsoft, which give tier 1 preference to Unity.

Unity is the only 3rd party engine that can build to Nintendo switch (At least it was quite recently, not sure if its still the case)

Yoshi's Crafted World which appeared on March 29, 2019 was built using the UE4 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshi%27s_Crafted_World).

UE4 has been able to export to switch for a long time (Snake Pass notably released on switch, before any other console, 4 years ago) For Godot, there are companies that do the porting (presumably they developed their own interfacing layer), these services seem to be not very expensive, and one of the Godot founders runs one of these companies IIRC.

Exactly, this porting business model is quite common in the gaming industry, and one of the reasons why most studios don't really care about 3D APIs portability.

solar2d is on the way to achieve this goal too

That's not even remotely true. I know of half a dozen random 3rd party engines just off the top of my head.

i think Kingdom Rush on Switch used love2d. might be wrong.

And support isn't free. Unity must be paying Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft to give support on console. So maybe Unity just decided to pass on the cost to the developer a bit and also filter out a bunch of newbs that drive the cost higher.

At least in the past Microsoft and Nintendo (not sure about Sony) used to actually pay Unity to implement/maintain support for their consoles. IIRC, when you had to buy licenses for each platform separately, developers who had the Nintendo SDK used to get the engine support for free (can't remember if they had to pay for the editor license themselves).

Nintendo used to provide a Pro build of the latest Unity that didn't rely on your existing licenses in any way to function.

IIRC you could even use it to make a release PC game builds, but I'm sure Unity could figure out what you were doing if you actually shipped with it as a workaround for buying your own license.

Godot is a toy engine compared to Unity, for consoles it's not even a dicussion.

Having the source code available is much better as an investment. Unity support (forums, answers, whatever) is a joke.

It is very sad that whatever gamedev question you have, if you search in google and add "Unity" the answers quality degrades a lot.

Unity also has the source code available, not as free beer.

Why do you think this will give Godot more attention and not Unreal?

Especially given the tech demos coming out for the next unreal. I forget the name of the system they're using for lighting or texture detail... but it's pretty friggin impressive.

Lumen is the lighting system. Nanite is the technology allowing you to use much (like, orders of magnitude) higher polygon counts in a scene (basically an infinitely dynamic LOD*). You can download the early access UE5 now and I've got to say, they are lightyears ahead of Unity, technologically.

Considering how beginner friendly UE is (visual scripting, graph based material editor, etc.), and their (IMO) much better pricing scheme**, I think UE will eventually replace Unity as the go-to engine for indie devs unless Godot really step up their game.

* This is an oversimplification. I don't really know what I'm talking about

** completely free until $1M in revenue, then 5% royalty. You also get free access to Quixel Megascans and Mixer (which are normally quite expensive) and full access to the source code. Not to mention MetaHumans which is a game-changer in itself

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