Questions about PS4/XBone/Swtich SDKs

I have a few question to developers who have released on PS4/XBone/Switch or are actively developing for these platforms:

How long did you wait before apply for SDKs?
Did you have any issues with the application process?
Was there a lot of technical challenges or issues getting your game to run on these platforms once you did?

My team is about 1.5 years into development of this game with probably another 1.5 to go (... why do we do this again). I'm wondering if I should bother applying yet or wait till have a more complete game to show.

Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks

 

You'll find people aren't really allowed to answer really anything because of NDA's.
But honestly, in my opinion, getting onto consoles is much like Network programming.
It's better to try to do it as soon as possible so you don't have to re-create the entire game to add the net-code into it.

Unless your game is very basic graphics.

EDIT: Because if your game has good graphics, and you get it onto console near the end, and realize you have to re-create all the art again.

 

Here are links for getting started with console development:
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/developers/id
https://www.playstation.com/en-us/develop/
https://developer.nintendo.com/

Each company will start by forcing you to agree to an NDA. That is why you won't get information from other developers about console development.

 

As far as when to approach console platform companies, I would suggest waiting until your game is already available on Steam. Console companies have no desire to work with unestablished developers unless the game is really polished already. If you have a small team, focus your resources on polishing your game.

Remember, Microsoft was not interested in an exclusive on PUBG until after millions of people were already playing PUBG on Steam.

 

@ShilohGames It's really a double edged sword in all reality. You can wait until your game is established enough, but if you do that, and it turns out you finally get the dev kit you want, and then your game is running at 2FPS on said console, you just wasted the entire development time and getting peoples hopes up like the devs of Yooka Laylee did. People were furious because they said it would be on so and so console and then, all of a sudden, not any more.

So with all that being said, I suppose it also depends on the game as well.
2D Sidescroller I doubt you'll find any issues that will effect any platform other than phones.
Next Gen AAA Better than COD Graphics, yeah umm you might want to get the console while still early in development so you can see how much stress you can push on the systems.

Because how can you truly prepare your game while never being able to test it on said system, definitely when everything about it is secret.


But I do certainly agree it's way better to have something extremely polished when submitting to them, nobody wants to see a cube jumping and double jumping and saying it's a leet mechanic haha.

 

Trying to optimize a game for a console before the game is even finished is probably not a good use of time unless you have a large enough team to dedicate specific people to the console port. Steam is very welcoming toward indie devs, so that is the platform small indie devs should polish their games for. If devs want to eventually bring their games to consoles, they need to show those platform owners something very polished. To get the best response from console platform owners, small devs should consider polishing their game for Steam and releasing it on Steam before spending any effort begging console platform owners for a dev kit.

Also, I don't know how many people were involved with Yooka Laylee, but I am guessing it is more people than what we would often call a small indie dev team.

 

In order to get a first idea if and how your game performs on Xbox One, you can build for UWP and deploy to your Xbox One without having to get any license upfront. You just need to install the UWP module in Unity and you're done.