By forming a company they can finally provide “official” (though guarded by NDA) console support for Godot. This is by far my biggest issue with the engine and why it’s a complete non-starter for any serious game development.
It also means they could provide paid support when Bad Stuff happens with the engine. For a similar reason I have enterprise support with Unity, and it’s been worth it’s weight in gold.
One of the creators of Godot, Ariel Manzur, already has a company that provides signed developers access to NDA'd console ports of the engine. It's not official in any capacity, and isn't advertised by Godot more than the other companies that offer the same services (Pineapple Works, gotm.io, etc.)
I assume it's going to be the same if W4 ever moves into porting.
I wish these companies would provide more information on the path to exporting for console. I know there are NDAs, but even for smaller libraries like Monogame and Heaps they at least mention that you can access a repo to do console builds. For the Godot path I was under the impression that you need utilise these companies as a publisher in order the build for console, which opens up a whole host of unknowns at the outset of the project.
Indeed, these are for-profit companies who will handle the porting job or assist you in it (they're not all publishers, mind). They could be more transparent, I agree, but as they want to sell a service, public documentation is probably not their priority. That would be the Godot project's role, except as they explained in a recent blog post [1], as a free software and entirely public project (not a company), they couldn't work on console-specific code let alone host it or document it. It could be done in private by volunteers, but it hasn't been the case so far, only for-profit companies did it - likely because of how complex it is, and how tricky working with console manufacturers is.
So the state of Godot on console is out of Godot's hands, and that's why there is no documentation on it right now. But that might change with a company focused on bridging the gap between Godot and console manufacturers, which one of the W4 founders is alluding to [2].
I really hope we got a lot of transparency with this new company. I would very much be happy to pay a company a sizeable amount to obtain the console compatible version of the engine. It just needs to be clear to me what the pricing and terms are when I am evaluating game engines for new projects. Right now it is too risky to start a project in Godot with the hope that a 3rd party will deliver a console port for a reasonable price many months, or perhaps years into the future.
This is all so smart. Commercial support and premium features are huge.
Over time Godot will eat into both Unity and Unreal. No indie developer will want to hitch themselves to these locked down commercial engines. Only big gaming firms will do it, because they want the support and maturity. Or niche businesses, such as ArchViz. They have teams to do license negotiation.
For indie devs, this is the first time you can "own your entire codebase" while including a technically capable and sophisticated engine that wasn't written in-house. This gives them free reign over how to distribute their games and code. They can even give their players full access to the code itself, which is a game changer for preservation and modding.
As Unity and Unreal mindshare drains, Godot will pick up serious steam. An entire ecosystem will form. Godot will catch up, feature for feature.
Epic Games is currently chasing {games, film, archviz, automotive, Geo/GIS, etc.} with Unreal Engine, meanwhile small and nimble startups will leverage open source Godot to fully throw themselves at each of those markets. They'll do a better job than Epic could ever do with their divided attention.
Godot is going to change the future of several industries. It may slay the game engine giants.
Google, Amazon, and Apple will begin contributing to Godot. If the writing isn't on the wall for Unity and Unreal by that time, FAANG support will make it crystal clear.
W4 Games needs to make sure it protects itself from AWS Luna, Google Stadia, etc. so that it can set terms for those platforms favorably in the future. That way it can continue making money from building up this incredible platform.
New game developers picking up things for the first time will hear about Godot's advantages and choose it over Unity and Unreal, since it's arguably a better fit for where they're at. Over five to ten years, this will have a non-negligible impact on the pipeline of engineers and games.
Apple also has a huge beef with Epic Games, and I wouldn't put it past them to give giant grants to Godot. They can make use of the output for their own needs.
Picking a game engine that subtracts hundreds of millions of potential players from your game without huge engineering effort to support a single console? Yea, that's a problem.
There are many successful game genres which are functionally PC-only, because you cannot reasonably play them with a gamepad. See Paradox grand strategy games, for example. Those "potential buyers" never existed.
CK3/Stellaris proved you could do grand strategy on console.
Halo Wars 1/2 proved you could do RTS on console.
Cities Skylines/Prison Architect proved you could do Sim games on console.
FFXIV proved you could do hotkey MMOs on console.
While you certainly can't forklift existing games like aoe2/sc2 onto a controller, I'm pretty much out of the business of assuming consoles are unsuitable for genres these days
Best to start small with your first few games regardless. porting is always harder than the industry leads on to suggest and to be frank, your first games will suck a lot. Porting can come after making something people want to play.
But all of that is tangential to why I wouldn't recommend Godot for a first game not unless you are already a competent C++ programmer and are ready to dig into the engine for problem. But I always like when I can chime in on how frustrating the porting process is.
For a Game Engine yes, it relegates you to an (albeit still quite large but inevitably an order of magnitude smaller) niche and hinders adoption significantly
I've read that Godot doesn't support consoles (out of the box) because it can't integrate NDA'd console SDKs and tools. But why can't the Godot IDE use a plugin architecture that delegates to console SDKs and tools that the game developer has installed on their own machine?
It's that it can't sign the NDAs in the first place. From what I understand, getting godot to output graphics on a switch or ps4 or whatever isn't the hard part. It's meeting quality control metrics from nintendo, sony, etc. When you partner with a company for porting, it's their experience that you're getting more than code.
Emulators don't stop them from selling games really. That whole paranoid lock-in mentality isn't helping them. Sony started to realize that to some degree and now sometimes even sell their games on GOG.
Steam Deck basically uses Linux with open stack to run games and is selling like hot cakes.
It also means they could provide paid support when Bad Stuff happens with the engine. For a similar reason I have enterprise support with Unity, and it’s been worth it’s weight in gold.