With an extra $18 million raised, W4 Games plan to continue to expand their enterprise technology and support for the open-source Godot Engine. This new round of funding that was just announced was led by "Tencent, with support from other investors including OSS Capital, LUX, Naval Ravikant and Tobias Lutke’s family office".
W4 Games said they have also now "signed a multi-year strategic partnership with Tencent" to help them scale up the business and Godot ecosystem across Asia to help with the likes of marketing, localization, ecosystem support, advocacy and so on.
Statements from the announcement:
“This collaboration with Tencent marks an important next step for W4 Games as we expand globally and bring Godot to more studios and developers,” said Nicola Farronato, Co-CEO of W4 Games. “With Tencent as both a strategic partner and an investor, we have an opportunity to accelerate the adoption of enterprise-ready Godot technologies, particularly in Asia, while continuing to strengthen the open-source ecosystem that sits at the heart of everything we do.”
“Over the past few years, Godot has emerged as one of the world’s fastest-growing game engine technologies, with W4 Games at the forefront of its adoption by major studios and enterprises. We’re excited to work with Tencent to build on the momentum and further establish Godot Engine as a leading platform for companies creating the next generation of video games,” said Juan Linietsky, W4 Games founder and Godot Engine creator.
How will this affect the open source Godot Engine? Well, W4 Games say they expect their own contributions directly to "continue growing alongside its enterprise business" as they try to upstream everything they can to benefit everyone.
I'm sure some will feel rather uneasy about Tencent being involved, but realistically this is actually a further healthy sign for wider Godot adoption, and for it fully succeed it does need some strong backing outside of a few core contributors and community developers.
W4 Games also have multiple open jobs you can apply for.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Dmitri Seletski 25 Aug 2026
I am not convinced.
What do you guys think about that?
Quoting: NagezahnThe larger the user base, the easier the Godot developers could (in theory, mind you) get away with "oh, you find this new UI hard to use? well, sorry, but we don't need you as a user in particular, especially not when so many other users are waiting for the new SuperMegaShader TM".The nice thing about Godot being open-source is anyone can be a Godot developer - you don't need to work for Godot Inc. first. Yes, the maintainers can reject your MRs so it's not a golden bullet, but you have a fair shot
Thank goodness Godot is FOSS so it can be forked when W4 inevitably goes down.
Mountain Man 25 Aug 2026
seflasporin 25 Aug 2026
Quoting: CarollyOff the top of my head I can't think of a company that got Tencent investment that didn't eventually fold.Ironically it seems that getting money from Tencent somehow puts you one step closer to going bankrupt.
Thank goodness Godot is FOSS so it can be forked when W4 inevitably goes down.
Kimyrielle 25 Aug 2026
Caldathras 25 Aug 2026
Quoting: seflasporinI don't get this perception that growth and expansion are universally good things. Godot has improved tremendously in the last few years but it's still not ready for use in large-scale production environments and I fear trying to force it will just get rushed, bloated features pushed into the engine before it's able to handle them (Oh, hi Unity.)That has been the mindset of the corporate business elite since the nineties if not the late eighties. Business school graduates are taught this mentality while earning their diplomas and then take that with them into the corporate culture. It was wholeheartedly embraced by the shareholders of public corporations. Growth at all costs never made any sense to me back then and I was running a business in the nineties (mentored not academically educated). It is not sustainable.
It changed corporations from trying to be good community "citizens" to profit generating machines. You can thank Milton Friedman and his Friedman Doctrine for that.
Quoting: Mountain ManI'll keep this simple: I don't trust Tencent.Same, I avoid them like the plague. I wonder what their angle is here...
Quoting: CarollyOff the top of my head I can't think of a company that got Tencent investment that didn't eventually fold.Aren't they a major shareholder in Epic Games? Google says: Tencent owns a 28% minority stake in Epic Games, which is down from the initial 40% share it bought in 2012.
Quoting: AdutchmanI see this as a similar move to Amazon funding in OpenStreetMap (although that is not a company): alligned goals, Tencent money might go to shiny features but they still have other funds to do other things. I don't know much about the gaming industry, but it would see to me that their main motivation is that Godot makes it easier (and thus cheaper) to make games for their studios, and that it doesn't taoe a cut. Just that is worth a lot for Tencent and 18 million is probably not a gigantic amount of money for themDidn't something like this happen with Blender a while back? Like a lot of big generally untrustworthy outfits concluded that the closed offerings that ruled at the time were ripping them off and they'd rather have something open source, so they backed Blender and it became dominant.
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