Godot is really cool, but a clear and publicly delineated path to console distribution (and not "go talk to these guys", as they currently do) is going to be necessary to get material interest out of most of the gamedev space.
If you want mass adoption, you need to make it financially viable for commercial indies to use your engine, and good luck convincing those people if they know they need to hire a 3rd party company to port to consoles.
Since Godot can't really go the console route, though, they basically need to do the work of figuring out how their users can make enough money on just web, mobile, and/or desktop, and then articulate and successfully sell that solution to them. Steam Deck could help for sure, but it's a big ask
Wait, why not? I thought it was a deliberate choice on the devs' part not to prioritize native support for consoles, not something that's actually impossible (since obviously other third party engines do it).
- To develop for consoles, one must be licensed as a company. As an open source project, Godot does not have such a legal figure.
- Console SDKs are secret and covered by non-disclosure agreements. Even if we could get access to them, we could not publish the platform-specific code under an open source license.
[0] https://github.com/godotengine/godot-docs/blob/master/tutori...
2. So what? Yes, the console-specific stuff has to be kept secret, that sucks, but it's better than not having support for consoles at all. I'd rather have a closed-source module to port to consoles than having no official method whatsoever.
> MonoGame gets around it by having core team members that grant access to private trees for approved developers. It's not open source, but it's available.
Not ideal, but better than the Godot status quo.
However, it seems they are not compatible with the goals and philosophy of the Godot project. That is their choice to make and if you don't agree with it, then your needs don't match with Godot and you should choose a different project.
I can understand where Godot is coming from. Getting involved with the corporate world is a slippery and corrupting slope and before you know it you'll be partnering with ad and malware companies like Unity is doing. Ok maybe not, but it's still not a decision to take lightly and in a world where everyone is motivated by money it is refreshing to see some communities like Godot and Blender who are doing things their own way.
I think just doing the minimal amount of cooperation to get SDK's or what have you for consoles would be fine, and very few people would object even within the open source community. A few diehards would no matter what, but as long as the cooperation is bare minimum I think it'd go okay.
> Getting involved with the corporate world is a slippery and corrupting slope and before you know it you'll be partnering with ad and malware companies like Unity is doing.
Godot's team isn't a for-profit company, that's the key distinction here. Unity's primary purpose is to make money, offering a game engine is just a means to that end. Godot's primary purpose is to be a useful and easy-to-use game engine, so much less incentive to blatantly sell out.
An indie game dev may make their game for non-console platforms, and if that game proves to be a hit, a separate development effort could be made to target a console. Or a re-implementation. If console is the first, or only choice, i would argue that the team is not really indie (by which i mean self-funded and small).
And who knows - may be godot's popularity would change the way consoles engineer their legal contracts and not hide behind NDAs and secrecy to become more open.
"Could." Sure. Or they "could" use an engine that doesn't require reimplementation to target Where The Market Is.
Which is why, even though people really don't like it much, Unity gets used.
> If console is the first, or only choice, i would argue that the team is not really indie (by which i mean self-funded and small).
This has not been a reasonable statement for at least five years. Indie games don't have lead platforms, but they do, as a matter of practice, need to be on all relevant platforms to have a chance of financial viability. (A grand strategy game might not need to deploy to consoles. Most other stuff really, really does.)
> And who knows - may be godot's popularity would change the way consoles engineer their legal contracts and not hide behind NDAs and secrecy to become more open.
Platform holders do not care about your engine and no indie developers, even en masse, have enough weight to make swing them. EA and Activision might not, at least not in a way that wasn't a special exception just for them, and they move a lot of product by themselves.
Some of the first well known "indie" games were on Xbox live arcade on the 360, like Braid, Super Meat Boy, and Castle Crashers.
And while braid is indeed released first on console, there's at least one citation of Blow decrying the process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braid_(video_game)#cite_ref-xb... . Blow likely had no choice at the time because steam (in 2007) wasn't as big a platform as it is today.
I am still of the opinion that console-only releases are not good for indie developers, despite the apparent contradiction of it being more profitable. And the reason Braid had xbox live arcade release is more to do with the industry connection Blow has, rather than the merits of the platform. Even Blow himself initially thought he'd be making a PC release for this game (until the financial side-benefits of xbox arcade back then kicked in).
https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-...
The reason other consoles are not officially supported are:
- To develop for consoles, one must be licensed as a company. As an open source project, Godot does not have such a legal figure.
- Console SDKs are secret and covered by non-disclosure agreements. Even if we could get access to them, we could not publish the platform-specific code under an open source license.
- Consoles require specialized hardware to develop for, so regular individuals can't create games for them anyway.
Source: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/co...
2. So what? Yes, the console-specific stuff has to be kept secret, that sucks, but it's better than not having support for consoles at all.
3. Okay? Godot isn't just being used by "regular individuals", whatever that means, it's being used by people who want to make games and then sell them -- including, yes, companies -- and those people want to be able to publish games to consoles.
That last one is just bizarre. Who do they think their userbase is, exactly? "People who want to make games for PC and mobile but have zero interest in any consoles ever"?
I don’t understand why you are surprised by this? By your own admission, nobody that wants to develop for consoles would use Godot, so logically, their entire userbase are people that don’t want to do that.
There are absolutely people interested in using Godot as a game engine, including using it to make games for consoles. But many don't, because porting to consoles is painful and expensive, apparently involving third parties as a general rule.
Obviously people for whom porting to consoles is a high priority are unlikely to choose Godot right this second, but we're talking about potential users as well, not just the current exact userbase.
If you read articles like this, it doesn't sound like a small hobby project anymore: https://godotengine.org/article/donation-changes
Granted, it's still small potatoes compared to Unity, no doubt.
edit: huh, looks like they have several people full-time, from the article
> Godot is developed by more than a thousand contributors, and coordinating this massive community requires a full-time involvement of several of us (and hopefully soon even more full-timers), which your generosity enables.
edit2: holy shit Unity had 5000 employees in 2021 according to Wikipedia. I knew they were fairly big but goddamn, didn't think they'd be that big.
Man, now I'm also confused at how they can have a successful, popular game engine with a flourishing asset store and yet still be losing money. Just hired too many people?
This was posted earlier today by the Godot team: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-....
The Reddit discussion regarding the post: https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/vzo8tk/godot_and_con....