Developers working on Godot who want to bring their game to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, or Xbox Series X|S have some good news today: according to W4 Games vice president Simon Jones, the company led by Godot founders Rémi Verschelde and Juan Linietsky will distribute the console port and other platform interface tools as early as October.
This means that developers who have been reluctant to switch engines in the wake of Unity Execution fee debacle due to the lack of porting solutions they will have more choice available in the near future.
Developers unfamiliar with Godot's strengths and limitations might wonder why this is newsworthy. As it turns out, Godot's open source foundation created an environment where voting on engine updates was a million times easier to manage than porting software to proprietary consoles. In a conversation at Gamescom 2024, Jones, Verschelde, and Linietsky explained why Godot hasn't had any porting capabilities up to this point, why the team formed a separate company to develop the necessary tools, and how these challenges will impact the future of the increasingly popular game engine.
Open source engines like Godot cannot advertise proprietary code
There's a bit of “OK, I'll do it” at the heart of W4 Games. Verschelde and Linietsky explained to Game Developer that the company is structured as Red hat. It is a Godot-friendly tool developer for businesses that provides essential professional services and acts as a liability shield between platforms and developers.
The pair said they didn’t set out to create such a company as Godot’s user base grew. They hoped someone else would take over… but then no one did, and Unity’s Runtime Fee catastrophe prompted a huge number of developers to look for new solutions.
So the pair, who are intimately familiar with Godot and have recruited a team of experienced programmers across all the major consoles, founded W4 Games. There’s nothing stopping anyone else from starting a similar company, but now the pair can get developers shipping to consoles as quickly as possible.
Developers unfamiliar with the nuances of porting may still wonder why these tools were not integrated directly into Godot. According to Linietsky, there were two reasons: liability and resource usage.
The liability aspect is a sticking point. Godot is an open-source engine, and console platforms are built on “completely closed” technologies protected by strict nondisclosure agreements. “Here’s a simple example,” he said. “Imagine someone puts GPL-licensed code into the engine, and then a company uses that and makes a game and releases it on PlayStation, and the GPL licenses say they have to be open source, but the consoles are completely secret.”
“This will cause a lot of damage to a company like Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft, and then to the person who posted this. The person or company who posted this will have to take a lot of responsibility.”
Developers working on proprietary engines, such as the Unity and Unreal teams, build close relationships with console manufacturers to ensure their games are optimized for the various platforms. If the Godot Foundation were to take on this responsibility, it could leave the nonprofit in a precarious state.
This wouldn't be the only challenge the Foundation would have to face. If it had to pay the salaries of the (deservedly well-paid) W4 engineers, that would be money it couldn't devote to the core features of the engine, and it would have to do a lot of work to protect the interests of console manufacturers in the future.
Like other companies that have licensed Godot, W4 will be able to share some technical solutions with the community and help further develop the core of the engine. It is already working with Marvel Snap developer Second Supper on his next gameand the developer has publicly pledged to support the engine.
What does it mean for the founders of Godot to run a for-profit company?
Developers uncomfortable with Verschelde and Linietsky’s dual roles at W4 Games and on the Godot Foundation board have legitimate concerns, concerns so valid that the duo raised them in our conversation unprompted. If they, the founders of Godot, who sit on the nonprofit’s board, are running a for-profit company, aren’t there conflict-of-interest concerns?
Maybe. Some developers may have this concern for a long time. The pair explained that they have no intention of abusing this connection, but more importantly, they and other members of the Godot Foundation have laid the groundwork to ensure that W4 never “owns” Godot.
The Godot Foundation itself has strong conflict-of-interest policies, they said, and already takes an open-source, community-driven approach to engine updates. W4 Games has promised to bring as many tools back to the open-source community as possible, keeping only proprietary NDA-protected technology locked behind closed doors.
But if something were to go wrong, the pair hopes that Godot's open source nature will be what keeps it from crashing and burning. “If the Foundation were to get corrupted or something, [developers] “It would simply fork the project and create another foundation,” Linietsky said. “There is no real risk of a commercial company taking over.”
Jones added that W4 Games wants to mirror the mission of the Godot Foundation and “democratize” porting and other development tools as much as possible.
However you slice it, Verschelde and Linietsky have taken on a lot of responsibility in the game development community, shepherding a popular new game development tool and taking on the task of expanding its commercial viability. It will take a steady pair of hands and a clear vision of software development to ensure that the fruits of their labor don’t turn sour.
