Choosing Defold for Steam games production

No, I don't believe donations to defold cover any console access fees: https://defold.com/manuals/sony-playstation/ https://defold.com/manuals/nintendo-switch/ in both supported cases you have to get developer access to get access to proprietary sdk access. Plugins for game engines are typically offered, for free. The thing that costs money is a dev kit.

They try to justify why they charge for it here:

in this case access to the PlayStation®4 and Nintendo Switch SDK, tools and resources is strictly controlled by Sony and Nintendo. This means that the source code for the console platform implementations in Defold, including the editor and command line tools, can not be made available. This also means that the Defold Foundation is unable to receive community contributions to the code and documentation and it is the foundation which must provide all of the support and updates to the platform for as long as it is required to. The console source code access fee will help ensure that the foundation has the resources necessary to support the platform.

So they want money because they are apparently the only developers that can make plugins for defold to support consoles. Which isn't exactly true. You can get approved by the consoles as a developer, grab the console SDK, and implement it in anything. Including your own engine.

5 comments

Defold has seemed interesting for a while now but it feels like it still lags behind Godot in terms of 3D games. Although Defold charges 200 dollars (a month) for source code access to the console targets. Seems real anti-open.
- Iirc access to the console SDK usually has costs associated, so I’m assuming that fee to Defold covers those costs. With the current tooling there doesn’t seem to be much way around it
  
  No, I don't believe donations to defold cover any console access fees: https://defold.com/manuals/sony-playstation/ https://defold.com/manuals/nintendo-switch/ in both supported cases you have to get developer access to get access to proprietary sdk access. Plugins for game engines are typically offered, for free. The thing that costs money is a dev kit.
  They try to justify why they charge for it here:
  in this case access to the PlayStation®4 and Nintendo Switch SDK, tools and resources is strictly controlled by Sony and Nintendo. This means that the source code for the console platform implementations in Defold, including the editor and command line tools, can not be made available. This also means that the Defold Foundation is unable to receive community contributions to the code and documentation and it is the foundation which must provide all of the support and updates to the platform for as long as it is required to. The console source code access fee will help ensure that the foundation has the resources necessary to support the platform.
  So they want money because they are apparently the only developers that can make plugins for defold to support consoles. Which isn't exactly true. You can get approved by the consoles as a developer, grab the console SDK, and implement it in anything. Including your own engine.
- I agree. But it has a strong following. If you prefer coding in lua, it's not a bad option.