Friends in the industry all say it's a nonstarter that it does not (and will not) have cross platform support, as much as they hate Unity. Godot's official stance on it is that you should hire a team to port it for you lol...
And your friends are clearly just working in a different way than the many people who Godot is a good fit for.
Even beyond hobbyists and new game developers, there are plenty of business models and artistic visions that don’t need a console port or that can indeed outsource it once there’s some financial momentum.
Also paying a third party to port a game to a different platform is not really that uncommon, even in the Unity world. I remember the Dev of The First Tree did exactly this.
It is not like you can just put your game in the PlayStation-store even if you use Unity or Unreal. There is a process to it and your game has to fulfill certain standards.
A good strategy is to first publish for PC and see if the game gains any traction. If it does, well the console port will pay for itself. If not, you saved yourself lot's of work.
See also: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-...
I could see Nintendo bucking this trend but they have enough IP to be their own island.
It might be smart for Godot to punt; it lets them go faster than Unity and catch up
Microsoft's strategy is to sell PC games on Windows devices. They might call some of them Xboxes.
Valve's strategy is to maintain a Linux distro that can play PC games.
Sony also ran.
Are you sure about this? I mean, as awesome as that would be just look at the mobile market - Android had every chance to be a properly open OS (e.g. AOSP), but instead its a mess of flakey drivers, locked down bootloaders and other anti-user practices that curb our freedoms with our devices.
I foresee that trend mostly remaining as it is in regards to consoles as well (and IoT devices), outside of projects like Steam Deck. But then again, I'm still bummed out that it wasn't possible for me to install Linux on my PS4 and use it as a development box (since updates explicitly fixed any vulnerabilities that would allow for that), because its form factor was great.
Hell, it's probably just a matter of time until PCs and laptops are sold with locked down bootloader and only run Windows or whatever other manufacturer sanctioned/mandated OS would be included.
* Export to desktop platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux, UWP, and BSD.
* Export to mobile platforms: iOS and Android.
* Consoles: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One via third-party providers
https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-...
They mention a few other platforms where 3rd parties have implemented commercial compatibility libraries, but Godot is much bigger in scale & scope, and nobody's done the legwork on that.