How Painful Is the Lack of Console Exports in Godot?

One of the biggest arguments against using Godot is the lack of built-in console exports. How painful can it be?

To answer this question, let's focus on the numbers. There are a total of 1.86 billion accounts registered on Steam. Steam declares that it has 132 million monthly active users and 69 million daily active users. Can we trust these statements?

According to the site https://store.steampowered.com/charts, at the time of writing this article, there were 32,924,810 users logged into Steam. It would be safe to assume that while one half of the globe sleeps, the other half plays, so it would make sense to double this number and recognize it as the number of active clients. Therefore, these numbers seem to be correct.

What about console gamers? How many are there? Let's see how many last-generation consoles have been sold. This is the group we are potentially losing. Microsoft reported that so far, 21 million Xbox Series X/S consoles have been sold. Regarding PlayStation 5, Sony Interactive Entertainment declared that the number of PS5 consoles sold since launch has exceeded 50 million. Typically, when someone buys an Xbox, they do not buy a PlayStation, and vice versa. The exception, of course, are game reviewers, YouTubers, and streamers, but this is not a group that significantly changes the statistics. We can assume that we are losing 70 million players by choosing Godot.

Additionally, there is a large number of Nintendo Switch users - more than 141 million units of this console have been sold. I do not have access to the latest data, but according to those from 2020, about 70% of Nintendo Switch owners also had another console. Probably these proportions have not changed.

It can be assumed that by using the pure Godot engine, we lose access to 30% of the 141 million Nintendo Switch owners (about 42 million users) and 70 million Xbox S/X and PS5 users. That's 112 million players. This is a significant group, even as large as the group of active PC players.

It is not a small piece of the pie, and the numbers indicate that PC players do not dominate console players.

What conclusions should be drawn? The only conclusion I draw is that Godot needs forks that enable porting games to consoles, but access to them should not cost us as much as using Unity. There are still too few companies providing such services, and those present on the market are scandalously expensive, which kills the popularity of Godot. Since Unity withdrew the fee for each installation of a game created in Unity, Godot's advantage over other solutions has diminished. Despite the irreversible loss of user trust, the chance of a similarly foolish move by Unity Technologies is quite small.