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Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

> I think at this point, the real question is who in their right mind would ever build a game in Unity again?

This is pretty unfortunate, because Unity is partly responsible for the surge of Linux gaming over the last 10 years. Supporting Linux comes nearly for free on Unity (compared to many other engines), and fewer Unity games will likely mean fewer Linux games.

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Depends what they jump to; godot, for instance, should be similar AIUI?

My humanGPT hallucination on the situation would be that because Unity is proprietary and Godot is open source, Unity runtime would be less diverse and more stable. How much of this is correct, I don't know though.

Godot is never going to be able to ship for consoles due to license incompatibility. That's a pretty big dealbreaker for non-hobbyist projects that aren't exclusively targeting desktop.

Godot games have been shipped on consoles plenty of times

There are paid, non open source forks that support console.

Actual godot does not, and never will.

From their own docs:

“ 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”

Consoles no longer require specialized hardware to develop for. There are test kits for ps5 but you can compile on your PC. Where are you getting your information from? The only requirement is a header or two and a code sign. Godot OSS can’t support consoles because the SDK (those headers) are closed source, but there’s nothing stopping you from implementing the half dozen header functions in Godot source yourself. There’s some companies trying to provide that support. I’m sure Godot* (the company) will as well.

To dismiss Godot because you, a solo hobby dev, can’t target PS5 is hilarious.

That is literally from the godot site.

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

I think you're conflating two things.

To paraphrase the docs : You can ship games on consoles, but the tools required to do so will never be included in the open source code.

Eg. Just because you need to buy a tin opener to open your can of beans, doesn't mean you don't have any beans

You can carve a spoon into a can opener. That doesn’t make an unmodified spoon a can opener.

Did you read it? It clearly backs what I just said. Godot open source doesn’t support consoles because console sdks are closed source, but there’s nothing stopping you from publishing on consoles. They literally list a company who is doing that, more are following. There’s no restriction at all other than you having access to the SDKs which you get when you sign a contract to publish your game on their platform.

So your argument breaks down to "once I get access to the closed source console SDKs and spend money for devkits, I will need to use a closed source fork of Godot to ship my closed source app on consoles"? What is the alternative? The console vendors do not allow console ports to exist in the open.

Use Unity, Unreal, or anthoer commerical engine that doesn't have a large upfront cost?

Unity, Unreal, and friends have these similar problems: the console SDK isn't open and may require porting work to integrate with the engine.

The difference is that lots of Unity and Unreal developers go through the trouble to do this.

With unity you get the console version of unity when are authorised by the console manufacturer. So it’s not like you have to do much to make at least the core engine work on console. The work is in the game itself which is different game to game.

Why would an SDK be secret?

Because the console manufacturers want to protect their proprietary platforms.

Protect them from what?

Reputational damage. Big part of the appeal of consoles is “it just works”. That falls apart of you start letting random shovelware devs ship whatever.

Ok? What does that have to do with the SDK?

Having access to the SDK doesn't give you unfettered access to publish on their stores. It only allows you to write and compile code targeting their hardware/runtime.

That has nothing to do with SDK secrecy.

Security through obscurity(which is often enough btw).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983#Loss_...

TLDR A game market flooded with shovelware crap is a disaster for everyone.

Modern day consoles intentionally add hurdles/friction/cost to publishing in order to weed out the less serious studios.

No, that's a different concern entirely. Nintendo could (though never will) open up Switch development to everyone while still exercising judicious control over which games are listed in their own store.

And in the meantime, there's already tons of crap shovelware on the Switch storefront. Nintendo doesn't filter for quality.

Linux doesnt run on consoles though and the comment was about linux, which godot supports quite well. Once it gains popularity it will also sort out console issues.

In my experience Proton works so well now that the only games that don’t work are those with really invasive anti-cheat systems

Thankfully due to proton, unreal engine games (and home rolled engines) should just work out of the box too.

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