W4 Games hopes to capitalise on Godot growth with $18m investment

Open-source game engine Godot has grown substantially in recent years.

The tech has been in development since 2007. Adoption has grown steadily for years since being made open-source, but one of the biggest catalysts for growth was the Unity Runtime fee fiasco, since reversed, which left some developers looking for alternatives.

The data shows adoption has increased substantially - though the developers themselves admit their measurement for usage is a little messy. Cumulative installs across Steam and Google Play - including duplicate downloads - rose to around three million by February 2026.

SteamDB, which tracks how many Godot games are released on Steam, showed a 50% increase year-over-year between 2024 and 2025.

During the Game Makers Tool Kit Game Jam 2026, Godot was the most-used game engine, accounting for 47% of the 10,511 games.

Of course, it’s worth noting that, according to Unity itself, over 70% of the top 1,000 mobile games were made using Unity. The rivals have not vanished.

Investment backing

One company looking to capitalise on Godot’s growth is W4 Games. Described as an enterprise partner for Godot Engine, it provides commercial tools, cloud services and support for studios. It was founded in 2021 by co-CEO Nicola Farronato and Godot veterans Juan Linietsky, Rémi Verschelde and Fabio Alessandrelli.

The company has just raised $18 million in a Series B round led by Tencent, with support  from OSS Capital, LUX, Naval Ravikant and Tobias Lutke’s family office. It brings total funding in the firm to $33m to date.

W4 Games aims to expand the international team by 50% and expand development of its enterprise offering to catch the “significant adoption and momentum” the engine is seeing globally. 

Building for scale

Speaking to PocketGamer.biz, Farronato says Godot used to just be for small indies, but is now being picked up by the likes of Meta, Google, Apple, Second Dinner and, following this latest deal, “hopefully soon Tencent”.

“Tencent represents a fantastic partner to join forces for Asian expansion. Godot is experiencing fast growing user adoption in China and Japan, in particular, and many enterprise grade companies are reaching out to W4 to begin new exciting projects with Godot.

“While the US and Europe are already strong markets for Godot, and will continue growing, we are expecting exceptional acceleration from Asia.”

Farronato says Godot’s growth really kickstarted a few years ago and accelerated from 2023 with the release of Godot 4. That’s also the year the Runtime Fee was announced.

“Our ambition for W4 is to build a global scale company able to change the game tech paradigm with constant innovation, inclusiveness and enterprise level top support.

“There is no limit for Godot to grow. It can become as used as Unity and Unreal if we keep on working hard and in an excellent way.”