There's a new option in town for developers looking to publish their games on the Switch: Gotm Publishing Program.

If you haven't been following Gotm.io's roadmap, in July, Godot developers will be able to publish premium games on the platform. They will be only available to premium players paying probably $3 a month.

The program will also include a way for the games to get published on the Nintendo Switch.

How will it work?

You can read the full explanation on Gotm's post or take a look at the publishing contract. But for a summary, the main points are:

• The game needs to be at least 2 hours long
• It doesn't need to be finished to be accepted
• If accepted, a soft deadline will be set for the game
• The developer needs to take part in a one-on-one monthly checkup
• The is no upfront cost for the developer
• On the Switch, 70% of the revenue goes to Gotm until they have recuperated $4,375, after which the developer gets 70%

The last point is the most interesting one: Once your games reach $5,687 in revenue ($1,312 for you), you'll get 70% of everything the game makes from that point onwards.

I don't have numbers for indie games on the Nintendo Switch, so I don't know how many games pass the 6 thousand dollar mark. Nonetheless, for a $0 publishing program giving a developer access to a Nintendo store, it doesn't seem bad at all.

To put it in context, on Godot's documentation page for console support, you can find a list of third-party companies offering porting and publishing services for Godot games on various consoles, including the Switch. Lone Wolf Technology's price for porting a game start at $3,000.

Godot's documentation also states that "Due to the complexity of the process, the budget to publish a game by yourself on a single console often exceeds $1,000 (this is a rough figure)."

If you google "How to publish a Godot game on Switch" you'll probably get a bunch of Reddit posts asking the same or related question over and over again. And the answer is always something along the lines of "it's complicated" and "you can hire someone to do it for you."

If you're a small developer looking to port your game to the Switch, Gotm's proposal sounds great, all things considered. I would like to see a live example once the program is running, but given Gotm's track record and support for Godot's ecosystem (btw, you can now host Godot game jams directly on Gotm.io), I can't imagine a reason why they wouldn't do a good job publishing premium games on consoles.

📰 Godot news round-up

• Game Maker's Toolkit 2021 Game Jam started just a couple of hours ago. The theme for this year's event is Joined Together
• BuildBox backtracked its controversial revenue model. They will only take the revenue generated by their monetization solution, not from paid apps, In-App-Purchases, etc. If you make money with their ad monetization, the revenue split is the same as before. Any other way, including your ad solutions, and you'll get 100%

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