One of the biggest weaknesses of the Godot game engine relative to Unreal or Unity, is the lack of out of the box console support. If you wanted to develop an Xbox, PlayStation or Nintendo Switch game using the Godot game engine, it was up to you to provide the tooling required to support the closed platforms. There are porting houses that support the Godot engine such as Lone Wolf and Pineapple Works, that essentially do the work for you for a fee. For those that would prefer to do the work themselves with better support for consoles in the Godot engine, W4Games announcement is ideal for you.
W4Games was formed recently by several members of the Godot leadership team. The purpose of W4Games is to provide support for commercial endeavours that aren’t well supported by an open source foundation.
W4Games just made an announcement regarding their upcoming console support:
Instead of offering porting services (which are still required by many developers and publishers), W4 Games will offer fully working console ports. These ports are intended to be middleware approved, meaning that the console manufacturer approves the port and certifies that it meets the required standards of quality, as well as supporting the full (or as close as possible) feature set of the console, including full integration to the console SDKs (for ease of development and deployment).
The W4 Games console ports will be focused on offering the same ease of use that is characteristic of Godot itself; i.e., bringing a console porting experience as similar as feasible to what the workflow for desktop and mobile platforms is today. Therefore, most developers will be able to port their own games by themselves, with less reliance on third parties. We will also host community platforms where you can exchange information with other users (and also the W4 Games team) in order to find solutions to the most common problems and help us improve the offerings.
The main version of Godot offered by W4 Games will be Godot 4.0, which is going to be in stable release at the point it can be licensed for consoles. While demand for the Godot 3.x branch exists, this version is far too difficult to port efficiently to consoles due to its heavy reliance on OpenGL.
You can learn more about W4Games upcoming console support for the Godot 4 game engine in the video below.