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).
I don't know what your objection is. They make a game engine, they support PC and mobile by default, console is the obvious missing piece of functionality. I can understand why it's lower priority because yeah, it's harder to support, but at least one of the devs works on this full time, and the two core devs have been working on this for several years now. I think it's a bit beyond hobby project, they're clearly trying to compete with Unity, even if it's not a for-profit company.
Granted, it's still small potatoes compared to Unity, no doubt.
edit: huh, looks like they have several people full-time, from the article
> Godot is developed by more than a thousand contributors, and coordinating this massive community requires a full-time involvement of several of us (and hopefully soon even more full-timers), which your generosity enables.
edit2: holy shit Unity had 5000 employees in 2021 according to Wikipedia. I knew they were fairly big but goddamn, didn't think they'd be that big.
Man, now I'm also confused at how they can have a successful, popular game engine with a flourishing asset store and yet still be losing money. Just hired too many people?
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.
Source: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/co...