GoKawiilTLDR: Written version of the talk I gave at Develop Brighton 2026. Yes Godot can ship commercial VR, we paid roughly £80k in early adopter tax to do it. War stories from rebuilding Godot's core, the community PS5/PSVR2 port with George Marques and André Ewald, why I ended up writing a whole new render server for 4.7, and a call to arms for platform holders and render programmers. Nothing in here is PlayStation NDA material, sorry.
Extended talk recording this article is based on.
I gave this talk at Develop Brighton this week and wanted to share a more public version. A bit slower, no conference clock, and this written companion for the folks who prefer reading to watching. Nothing in this talk is NDA'd about PlayStation, sorry about that. There are juicier behind the scenes details but those live in partner spaces where I'm allowed to share them.
This was originally meant to be a post mortem. Then a bunch of stuff happened, which means it is now a partial post mortem. You'll see why.
Who Am I
I'm Claire and I've been doing this since the PS2 days. I contribute to Godot, mostly on the OpenXR side and increasingly some render stuff here and there. I've shipped a wide range of games and I've been doing VR since 2013. I joined Sony to work on PSVR networking and my team there did significant metaverse work: social VR chat, hand gestures, all that stuff came out of us. Most recently I shipped Dreams and Substance 3D Modeler, and now I'm working on Augmental Puzzles.
Up Front: Godot Works
Some of this talk is going to come across a bit negative and I want to say up front that it is not meant to be. Godot works for many many teams. If you're making a 2D game it's kind of a no-brainer, and for most simpler 3D games it's very reliable.
Some honest caveats though. If you're doing an open world or streaming heavy game, leaning on lots of character animation, or going for a very realistic art style, Unreal is probably a better fit. If you're an out-the-gate VR dev, especially standalone, you might prefer Unity because the renderer is a bit more capable. Godot has an asset library but at the moment it's free only, which will change in future, but it means the ecosystem isn't as well serviced as the others. And on console porting there are plenty of studios providing the service, but the community port side is less mature.
Can Godot Ship Commercial VR?
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