Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aissen | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that they did not keep this a paid product, and use that as a lever:

1. to either get more customers

2. or to get Nintendo to remove the terms forbidding the open source release of software built on their platform

I am guessing that 1. will happen anyway, and 2. isn't needed since they have found a middle ground with Nintendo hosting details on their developer portal.

View on HN

The fact that Godot requires/required a third party studio to port your game to consoles is a major turnoff and one of the things preventing developers jumping on the Godot train. From a solo dev point of view, too scary and expensive; from an indie company's point of view it's an unwanted extra expense and a potential point of failure that you can't control.

This opens things up considerably, despite the Nintendo walled garden.

I'd assume for solo devs porting to multiple platforms is harder without external help.

"Official" paid console ports are coming very soon (Q1 2024) from W4 Games, the company run by Godot's core developers.

https://w4games.com/products/

No open source project can do it without third party support, the NDAs/etc required for getting access to the SDKs to build against those platforms prohibits it.

What does 2. mean exactly? That I am not allowed to publish the source code of my Switch game as open source? What if my Switch port shared code (for example all the GDScript) with other ports. Does Nintendo also forbid me to publish this as open source? Can you use open source assets in a Switch game?

I'm not a licensed Nintendo developer but off of my knowledge from the Wii U era...

The Godot game engine cannot include any of the Nintendo Switch SDK nor can your game include any of the Nintendo Switch SDK or APIs unless you are a registered Nintendo developer and have signed their NDA. You cannot share any of Nintendos proprietary code or information.

So you could share your source code for a Switch game, minus any code or SDKs specific to the Switch.

Thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com