[jmcgough]

Friends in the industry all say it's a nonstarter that it does not (and will not) have cross platform support, as much as they hate Unity. Godot's official stance on it is that you should hire a team to port it for you lol...

[swatcoder]

I think you mean it doesn’t include “console support” not “cross-platform” support, and as it is very much cross-platform across desktop and mobile targets.

And your friends are clearly just working in a different way than the many people who Godot is a good fit for.

Even beyond hobbyists and new game developers, there are plenty of business models and artistic visions that don’t need a console port or that can indeed outsource it once there’s some financial momentum.

[BudaDude]

Their official stance is that they can not release the code for consoles because of NDAs. You won't find any open source engine with console support because of that. They are hoping that consoles loosen up and open source their SDK.

[cardanome]

Godot has excellent cross platform support, just not for consoles that requires NDA's and stuff to develop for. This can't be helped on the Godot side but is the fault of the console manufactures who make the rules.

Also paying a third party to port a game to a different platform is not really that uncommon, even in the Unity world. I remember the Dev of The First Tree did exactly this.

It is not like you can just put your game in the PlayStation-store even if you use Unity or Unreal. There is a process to it and your game has to fulfill certain standards.

A good strategy is to first publish for PC and see if the game gains any traction. If it does, well the console port will pay for itself. If not, you saved yourself lot's of work.

See also: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-...

[somehnacct3757]

If you're long on the games industry we are probably in the last generation of game console architecture. Everything is going to be Windows or Linux boxes with PC hardware next gen.

I could see Nintendo bucking this trend but they have enough IP to be their own island.

It might be smart for Godot to punt; it lets them go faster than Unity and catch up

[r_hoods_ghost]

I've been hearing that since the first Xbox came out (which used an x86 architecture before the Xbox 360 moved to powerpc) and it still hasn't happened.

[somehnacct3757]

Consoles are actively migrating their audiences onto digital subscription services so that the brand has an identity separate from the console. The future is selling hardware if you must, so you can make money selling PC games.

Microsoft's strategy is to sell PC games on Windows devices. They might call some of them Xboxes.

Valve's strategy is to maintain a Linux distro that can play PC games.

Sony also ran.

[KronisLV]

> Everything is going to be Windows or Linux boxes with PC hardware next gen.

Are you sure about this? I mean, as awesome as that would be just look at the mobile market - Android had every chance to be a properly open OS (e.g. AOSP), but instead its a mess of flakey drivers, locked down bootloaders and other anti-user practices that curb our freedoms with our devices.

I foresee that trend mostly remaining as it is in regards to consoles as well (and IoT devices), outside of projects like Steam Deck. But then again, I'm still bummed out that it wasn't possible for me to install Linux on my PS4 and use it as a development box (since updates explicitly fixed any vulnerabilities that would allow for that), because its form factor was great.

Hell, it's probably just a matter of time until PCs and laptops are sold with locked down bootloader and only run Windows or whatever other manufacturer sanctioned/mandated OS would be included.

[genpfault]

Is that just for 4.0? Since the features page[1] lists a number of deploy targets for 3.X:

* Export to desktop platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux, UWP, and BSD.

* Export to mobile platforms: iOS and Android.

* Consoles: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One via third-party providers

[1]: https://godotengine.org/features

[jamie_ca]

No, it looks like the same situation as 3.x: Godot is MIT licensed, and they don't believe it's possible for them as an open-source project to sign NDAs with console manufacturers and build in native compatibility without violating either the NDA or their open source principles.

https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-...

They mention a few other platforms where 3rd parties have implemented commercial compatibility libraries, but Godot is much bigger in scale & scope, and nobody's done the legwork on that.

[DigiDigiorno]

I'm not a game dev, but I read you can deploy to desktop (across multi os), mobile and web. That sounds pretty multi platform to me. What am I missing?