After doing some research on PS4 and Xbox it’s clear you must have a developer license with each to publish. My question is do you have to have the Dev license prior to building a game for these consoles in UE4?
Probably not, as you will only be able to build it for PC until you have the license anyways.
You can build the game, but you will have no way of knowing that what you’re building will run on the target hardware, and you will not be able to make platform-centric adjustments to suit them. Personally I would not recommend it as you may well run into problems later and you are guaranteed to lose a lot of time during the transition.
Thank you for the quick replies. I suspected that the Dev license would open up critical resources for proper development, but there was not much information to explain this. Most of the articles and forum threads I found were from 2013 and 2014 which I assumed might be outdated/stale. I was hoping that UE4 would be a suitable test environment, but this is understandable considering the hardware is key. Do you know if Sony or Microsoft still ship test consoles for development and testing?
Thank you again for the info. It is greatly appreciated.
You will have to contact both Sony and Microsoft to purchase a devkit from them. Once you have all of that set up on their end you contact Epic saying you have permission from Sony and Microsoft to work on their consoles.
You send the proof to Epic, and they they set you up on their end.
Both Microsoft and Sony do have indie developer programs that allow you to obtain cheap development kits, which is merciful (this wasn’t really a thing on the previous hardware gen!)
Hasn’t Microsoft said that every Xbox One IS a Dev Kit?
They’ve wanted to have that feature, but currently it isn’t possible yet. Considering how long it’s been I wouldn’t hold my breath
Dev kits usually have completely different firmware, more memory and some additional hardware (e.g. for PC->kit connectivity), so to be honest I don’t see it actually ever happening.
Thank you all for the feedback it is most appreciated and helpful