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W4 Games announces pricing model for console ports

w4games.com

1–10 of 22 posts

Re: W4 Games announces pricing model for console ports

#4
Successful indie games tend to be released on all major consoles, so call it $2k/year for a small team or $10k for a larger one.

That is more expensive than GameMaker (Undertale, Nuclear Throne) at a flat $800/year, but a lot cheaper than the number of Unity Pro licenses you'd need ($2k/seat).

Re: W4 Games announces pricing model for console ports

#5
> At W4 Games, we are staunchly committed to open-source software, and our pricing model reflects this dedication. We provide full source code access for all tiers, empowering developers to customize and optimize our ports as they see fit.

Under what license terms?

Re: W4 Games announces pricing model for console ports

#6

> At W4 Games, we are staunchly committed to open-source software, and our pricing model reflects this dedication. We provide full source code access for all tiers, empowering developers to customize and optimize our ports as they see fit. Under what license terms?

From reading the FAQ it seems the terms are basically that you have to keep paying the license fee in order to release content updates for your games on platforms where you used any of their code to make the build. And since this is for the 3 major game console platforms, any code that touches the console SDKs is under the NDA you have to sign with the console platforms.

Re: W4 Games announces pricing model for console ports

#8
This looks like great news for Godot! From reading the article, though, I can't understand what "per year" means in terms of console ports. Surely they won't invalidate your port at the end of the year, right? Is it just that you don't receive updates after the year is up?

Re: W4 Games announces pricing model for console ports

#10

What does "Publisher/Porting house allowed" mean?

A publisher is a company that can help a developer handle things like marketing, support and other things. Basically the same as a book publisher not actually writing books, which is what authors do. Sometimes, the publisher and the developer is the same company, sometimes there is only the developer, and sometimes they are two different companies.

A porting house is a company that specializes in porting games across platforms. Lets say you've built a PC game with Godot, and now you wanna launch it on PlayStation. Instead of doing the porting yourself, you can outsource this to a company who would do the port for you.

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