W4 Consoles Officially Launches Today! One-click Deployment to Switch & Xbox Series (With PS5 support in early access)

There's been surprisingly little fanfare for this but I guess most of the Godot community are hobbyists anyways.

9 comments

I always thought it was kind of ridiculous to gatekeep console development behind a paywall like this. With godot, there's even another layer to this since godot philosophically opposes integrating any kind of console compiler into their environment bcz of the licensing behind it. Hence this solution, which I'm even less of a fan of than the unreal model.
- It sounds like they have to to stay in compliance with the platform's rules, but the benefit of the engine being open source is that anyone else can offer the same porting services.
  
  If you build a game for unreal, you start from scratch or bend the knee to whatever they demand of you.
- They explain their reasoning here: https://godotengine.org/article/about-official-console-ports/ .
  
  Appreciate the link. I've read it before. I understand why they chose to do it, I just disagree with it personally.
- They'd have to charge for it anyway. It wouldn't be very different if they did it themselves.
- You can blame the console manufacturers for that. Their platform code is legally protected.
@popcar2 Great news, finding a suitable publisher is not always easy. W4 Games is offering a good deal and good tools. Perhaps I would have asked for a more affordable plan for games made by a single person, but I have no major complaints. The costs are quite reasonable according to what they offer 👍
How does this compare to the licensing for Unreal and Unity for console releases?

9 comments