[skneko]

As explained in [0]:

- 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.

[0] https://github.com/godotengine/godot-docs/blob/master/tutori...

[TulliusCicero]

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. I'd rather have a closed-source module to port to consoles than having no official method whatsoever.

[thristian]

Is there a practical difference between "Godot does not target game consoles" versus "Godot does target game consoles, but we can't tell you where or how or help you in any way"?

[TulliusCicero]

That's not what we're discussing. From another comment:

> MonoGame gets around it by having core team members that grant access to private trees for approved developers. It's not open source, but it's available.

Not ideal, but better than the Godot status quo.

[esperent]

Yeah I feel like there are definitely ways around this, technically and legally.

However, it seems they are not compatible with the goals and philosophy of the Godot project. That is their choice to make and if you don't agree with it, then your needs don't match with Godot and you should choose a different project.

I can understand where Godot is coming from. Getting involved with the corporate world is a slippery and corrupting slope and before you know it you'll be partnering with ad and malware companies like Unity is doing. Ok maybe not, but it's still not a decision to take lightly and in a world where everyone is motivated by money it is refreshing to see some communities like Godot and Blender who are doing things their own way.

[TulliusCicero]

If Monogame can do it, I don't see why Godot couldn't. Godot clearly wants to compete seriously with Unity at least in the indie game dev space, I don't see how you do that without a decent console solution. The more mature Godot becomes, the weirder it's going to seem that they don't support consoles.

I think just doing the minimal amount of cooperation to get SDK's or what have you for consoles would be fine, and very few people would object even within the open source community. A few diehards would no matter what, but as long as the cooperation is bare minimum I think it'd go okay.

> Getting involved with the corporate world is a slippery and corrupting slope and before you know it you'll be partnering with ad and malware companies like Unity is doing.

Godot's team isn't a for-profit company, that's the key distinction here. Unity's primary purpose is to make money, offering a game engine is just a means to that end. Godot's primary purpose is to be a useful and easy-to-use game engine, so much less incentive to blatantly sell out.

[chii]

why is it only when an engine support console do it mean "serious" competition?

An indie game dev may make their game for non-console platforms, and if that game proves to be a hit, a separate development effort could be made to target a console. Or a re-implementation. If console is the first, or only choice, i would argue that the team is not really indie (by which i mean self-funded and small).

And who knows - may be godot's popularity would change the way consoles engineer their legal contracts and not hide behind NDAs and secrecy to become more open.

[eropple]

MonoGame gets around it by having core team members that grant access to private trees for approved developers. It's not open source, but it's available.