I was just talking to a consultant about approaching publishers and he was saying that an immediate strike against my game is that it’s built on Godot and is therefore a pain to port to anything else, including Switch.
Does anyone here have experience with publishers in this regard or direct experience with the actual porting?
Do publishers really have this negative view on Godot in regards to Switch ports? i.e. is building a game on Godot a ‘red flag’ for a potential publisher?
I haven’t published but my guess is that…
I think Godot is still maturing. it probably doesn’t seem worthwhile for publishers to abandon more established engines for console porting. Unless you have capital to pay for it all. Bottom line, the market on Godot porting isn’t there yet is my guess.
but you should checkout W4 who cater specifically to Godot. I think they launched last year. I also believe there are one or two others. But I can’t remember their names
Hey, thanks for the link. That looks promising, but I’m not sure this would make publishers any happier as my understanding is that the middleware involved isn’t an approved solution by the console manufacuters? Unlike in Unity etc…
For me this sounds a bit more like an “excuse” for publishers. There’s several games made with Godot that have been ported to consoles (Cassette Beasts comes to mind, the devs have actually spoken about their console porting process).
Yeah, sounds more like an excuse to me too.
I’m pretty sure the biggest effort to getting a Godot game onto consoles isn’t porting the code or assets across, but rather going through the console vetting process, which is always painful, no matter which engine you’ve used.
I had several conversations with publishers and asked them about their takes on accepting or not games made in Godot. And without naming any names, here is what I can say.
While they were a bit skeptical a few years ago, after the recent gamedev industry developments, and hits like Brotato, and Cassette Beasts, there isn’t any doubt now that if the game is good they will pick it up.
An issue that still exists is that some of these publishers have developers that can assists the indie devs to work on the game, and those experts are mostly Unity developers, so it will be harder for them to offer you extra help. This is changing since there are more people entering the workforce with Godot knowledge now, but it is still not at the level of the rest of the engines (Great opportunity to do Godot consulting now 
).
There are also pros when using Godot. A rep from a big publisher wasn’t concerned at all about porting to consoles when I asked them. Their concern was “is it hard to run Godot games on the Steam Deck?”. Since you can export to Linux natively, you know that it is not hard at all. This was a nice surprise for them.
The license is also a big thing. Specially now. Even if Unity backtracked on the install fees as they were before, everyone is aware that the conditions might change at any moment, and this is not something that will ever happen with Godot.
So, while I can’t certainly talk for all of them, I can tell you that this is not the biggest deciding factor for them to pick or not your game. Not sure who this “consultant” is, but If you get any push-back because of it, it is probably not a good match. Good luck with the search!
Hi Emi,
Thanks Emi. That is encouraging to hear. I think you have a good point about the publishers having internal staff that simply don’t know how to help with a Godot project. Ironically I only recently ‘converted’ from Unity to Godot and it’s not really a big learning curve anyway! That’s good to know about the Steam Deck too. I hadn’t thought about that as the Steam Deck isn’t even available in my part of the world.
I’ll keep searching, maybe a publisher will even reply to me one of these days 
In addition to everything that was said above, I would recommend to also have a look at the Console Documentation.
It contains a list of companies that have ported Godot to different platforms. These usually also offer publishing too, so it might be worth contacting them.