This is huge! This definitely lowers the access barrier for smaller time game developers, now they can get approved by Nintendo themselves without having to put in a significant upfront investment with a porting company.

The W4 games option is still good to have for people that want to ensure there is as much feature parity as possible to the full Godot Suite!

i've seen some people online saying Nintendo is very selective, and opaque about choosing who is allowed to buy their $450 devkit...
but still, godot is pretty cool

Cool. But nobody is going to start another 3 year project on the switch anymore. Maybe with the switch 2 in mine if it's compatible with switch games. But cool anyway!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Here's one less reason for game developers to skip over using the free and open source Godot Engine, as it now has a free port available to bring games over to the Nintendo Switch.

You may remember recently that W4 Games, a company set-up by some of the Godot team, announced their own console port availability that has a cost attached to it which at a basic minimum would be $800 a year for a single console.

Many felt the price was too much but, since it's all open source, anyone else could come up with a porting solution and now they have — for the Nintendo Switch at least.

· Complimentary access: Available at no cost to all authorised Nintendo Switch developers.

· Expandability: Having access to the source code, developers with C++ knowledge have the opportunity to add and integrate additional functionalities as needed.

We recommend partnering with porting companies for medium or large-sized projects.

The original article contains 307 words, the summary contains 151 words. Saved 51%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!