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One niche Godot (or any OSS game engine) can't fulfill is seamless console ports.

Godot can't but Godot* can, where Godot* is a downstream fork of Godot maintained by $COMPANY that provides a seamless console port. There are a couple of companies trying to do this.

In the long term, if Godot gets big enough then console makers have incentive to assist in this themselves, because if an engine with major marketshare can seamlessly port its games to Xbox but has difficulty porting to Playstation then Xbox will have a competitive advantage.

In such a scenario I don't think the difference between Godot and Godot* matters that much, IMO - I could imagine an Xbox devkit shipping with a Godot* compiler, for instance, so devs don't even have to think about the issue.

Exactly. After all, it’s not like consoles are magic black boxes. They are pc’s in brutalist form. If you get a console contract, you’ll be able to do a console port. Before then, don’t even worry about it. Just focus on making the game. All the Xbox services or PlayStation sdk stuff comes after.

$COMPANY in this case is called W4 games, by the way: https://w4games.com/

oh and speaking of Godot: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-developer-fund/

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