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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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