[dljsjr]

W4 Games's CEO Juan Linietsky is the creator and lead dev of Godot. Their primary mission, from my understanding, is providing the non-open-source tooling and support that's needed to make it feasible to use Godot as an environment for developing console games. The SDK's and their APIs cannot be included in the FOSS Godot code directly.

Juan shared a blog post about the state of console support in Godot shortly before the launch of W4 that gives some more insight: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-...

Often time folks say that what Godot is missing is a "killer app" that shows that the platform is viable. I think that this could potentially go a long way towards that.

[brundolf]

I'm not sure it counts as a "killer app" since Unity and Unreal both have this feature already, but it's definitely another exciting step towards parity

[dljsjr]

By "killer app" I meant a really amazing game made with the engine that makes people stand up and say "oh hey Godot is legit".

Being a viable console target will attract more creators and increase the chances of that happening. As laid out in the blog post from my original comment, while Steam is a hotbed for indie games most of them toil in obscurity. Most of the money in indie games is on consoles now.

[Jach]

To me Godot became legit with version 3 adding physically based rendering like everyone else. But arguably there is one AAA game, the Sonic Colors: Ultimate remaster. Sure the studio modified Godot to some extent (but reportedly not enough to prevent e.g. scene loading in stock Godot 3) and they also did whatever was needed to port to the Switch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-RnhgZCqn4), PS4, and Xbox (4k@60hz) but a nice looking 3D game from a big franchise sounds legit enough to me. The creator of Godot was surprised though because he's intimately familiar with 3's limitations, but 4 is about done and is better in pretty much every way so maybe we'll see more of that sort of thing, and possibly with stock Godot. He did speculate that one reason Godot can be attractive for certain studios working on a franchise with an almost guaranteed minimum of sales is that it's one less thing to have a license fee for. Unreal Engine is amazing, but if you expect to gross over $1m, is 5% of your revenue each quarter forever afterwards worth it? It's not a straightforward question, but just 1.025 million units at $40 is a $2m fee, could you use that $2m to hire developers to patch up whatever shortcomings in Godot you actually need for your game and still ship on time? Or create a custom engine, as still happens occasionally?

[doomlaser]

Godot has already produced at least one unconventional indie darling hit that I know of, Cruelty Squad for PC: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/

[esrauch]

Even if that game is a hit, the videos on that steam listing don't exactly pitch it as the world's greatest 3d engine.

[ummonk]

I mean, if that's the best hit it's produced that's not exactly saying much for the engine...

[denkmoon]

Just to be clear, it's _meant_ to look bad. Part of the shtick.

Agreed though, not a glowing endorsement for someone looking to make the next Crysis.

[bbkane]

I think the largely open source nature of the Godot ecosystem is already the "killer app" and I hope parity in matters such as this expose that

[klodolph]

Unity has also gotten a bit intimidating to newcomers these days.

[ygjb]

It's also intimidating to people who have been using it for a long time as well.

The proliferation of new features some of which compete with each other, and the lack of focus and polish on some of those features make it frustrating to stay current.

That coupled with some questionable business partners and tone deaf comments by their leadership team has certainly piqued my interest in other platforms.

[ummonk]

Yeah the IronSource acquisition and the background and statements by its CEO makes me really question the long term prospects of Unity. Which is a shame because they're doing some good stuff on the tech side and have a solid engineering team.