I'm not keen on the specifics but part of the reason W4 exists is because the Godot Foundation can't just pass around console SDKs. Only publishers and larger companies can use them and they're usually under NDA.

So your options are going to a publisher like W4 Games (which is an entity by Godot's founders) to handle that for you, or you can try porting it yourself and going through all the legal shenanigans.

I think it’s because you can’t build for Xbox without Microsoft signing the binary. This is one of the reasons the Godot team founded W4 Games.

They claim that they cannot support any consoles for legal reasons: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-know/

it is impossible for Godot to include first-party console support out of the box. Even if someone would contribute it, we simply could not host this code legally in our Git repository for anyone to use.

Maybe that’s true, I’m not a lawyer. But Godot’s founders own one of the companies that provide console support: https://lonewolftechnology.com/

It could be a conflict of interest or an honest way to provide console support in Godot while also being compensated for their work on Godot. After all, food on the table is not open source.

The full list of Godot companies providing console support is here: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/consoles.html

@tabular @popcar2 who says it is? It's just a wrapper for this api. You could say that all API's are open source :)
Do you dislike godot as an OOS supporting closed source like windows/directx?