I'd love official console support but it's not possible being open-source. Porting it yourself is an option, but not many will be inclined to do that and would have to opt for paying a third-party to do so.
The reason other consoles are not officially supported are:
- To develop for consoles, one must be licensed as a company. As an open source project, Godot does not have such a legal figure.
- Console SDKs are secret and covered by non-disclosure agreements. Even if we could get access to them, we could not publish the platform-specific code under an open source license.
- Consoles require specialized hardware to develop for, so regular individuals can't create games for them anyway.
1. This doesn't seem like a big deal. I'm sure there's some legal-fu you could do here to have a 'company' that's the primary contributor to Godot. Wikipedia has a company of some sort, does it not? And Mozilla's a company.
2. So what? Yes, the console-specific stuff has to be kept secret, that sucks, but it's better than not having support for consoles at all.
3. Okay? Godot isn't just being used by "regular individuals", whatever that means, it's being used by people who want to make games and then sell them -- including, yes, companies -- and those people want to be able to publish games to consoles.
That last one is just bizarre. Who do they think their userbase is, exactly? "People who want to make games for PC and mobile but have zero interest in any consoles ever"?
> People who want to make games for PC and mobile but have zero interest in any consoles ever
I don’t understand why you are surprised by this? By your own admission, nobody that wants to develop for consoles would use Godot, so logically, their entire userbase are people that don’t want to do that.
There are absolutely people interested in using Godot as a game engine, including using it to make games for consoles. But many don't, because porting to consoles is painful and expensive, apparently involving third parties as a general rule.
Obviously people for whom porting to consoles is a high priority are unlikely to choose Godot right this second, but we're talking about potential users as well, not just the current exact userbase.
I just don’t think that ‘potential users’ are a really strong consideration for what ultimately amounts to a hobby project (or a project with no corporate backing anyway).