W4 Games is a new company from the creator of Godot Engine along with long-time contributors, and now they've managed to gain plenty of funding.
As a brief reminder, the idea of the new company was to provide commercial products and services like support plans and access to more restricted markets (like consoles) and generally support Godot Engine development. So all improvements made as part of W4 Games will go into Godot directly whenever possible.
In a new blog post, they've announced $8.5 million dollars from a "seed funding investment round" (a first ever round of funding for a company) led by OSS Capita, which is so far the world's only investor platform targeting commercial open source and LUX Capital who specialize in funding science and technology ventures. They also had help from the founder of Red Hat and Sisu Game Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund focused on games.
They said that the funds will "be used to expand W4 Games’ core team and accelerate the development of a suite of products and services for the Godot ecosystem, enabling all developers to create and publish games and applications on all major platforms" with a roadmap planned to be shown at GDC 2023.
For a free and open source game engine, this is hopefully very welcome news to help put it along side the much bigger teams from Unity, Unreal and others.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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The comments on this article are closed.
ssj17vegeta Sep 13, 2022
That's very good news. 8 millions seem like a big number !
Can't wait to put my fingers on Godot 4 :)
Can't wait to put my fingers on Godot 4 :)
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Quoting: ssj17vegetaThat's very good news. 8 millions seem like a big number !
Can't wait to put my fingers on Godot 4 :)
Works great now since alpha13. Only reason to wait, is if you rely on GDNative.
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Not sure I like that. Taking venture capital money is like making a deal with the devil: there's always a price. They want to see a return in their investment, after all, and an extremely high return at that.
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Quoting: DrMcCoyNot sure I like that. Taking venture capital money is like making a deal with the devil: there's always a price. They want to see a return in their investment, after all, and an extremely high return at that.
The good thing seems to be that it is not tied to Godot itself. Just a separate company that should provide Godot services.
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Quoting: EhvisThe good thing seems to be that it is not tied to Godot itself.
Yeah, that's what I'm kind of sceptical and wary about. I can't imagine that Godot itself won't be seen as collateral
But we'll see, I guess. Hopefully I'm wrong
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Quoting: DrMcCoyNot sure I like that. Taking venture capital money is like making a deal with the devil: there's always a price. They want to see a return in their investment, after all, and an extremely high return at that.Very true. Mind you, I get the impression that sometimes if you throw enough impressive buzzwords at them, they kind of lose track of where the money is actually going to come from. They like investing in stuff that checks the right fashionable boxes.
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Very nice!
The VC in particular. New too me. It's interesting to see a funding company that appears to be dedicated to open source companies. I can see a lot of benefits to having financial and business support that understand and had experience working with open source. Hopefully it works out well.
The VC in particular. New too me. It's interesting to see a funding company that appears to be dedicated to open source companies. I can see a lot of benefits to having financial and business support that understand and had experience working with open source. Hopefully it works out well.
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Kimyrielle Sep 13, 2022
Let's see where this goes, but I am not too worried. If the worst case happens and that company gets taken over by big-evil-business, I am very confident that Godot will get forked by a new dev team and live happily ever after. It happened after OpenOffice got taken over by big-evil-business, too. The good thing about open source is that it's fairly immune against hostile takeovers.
In the best case, this could be a positive game-changer for Godot. While not everything the team will be working on will get upstreamed to Godot, I am sure that a lot of it will.
In the best case, this could be a positive game-changer for Godot. While not everything the team will be working on will get upstreamed to Godot, I am sure that a lot of it will.
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Quoting: KimyrielleLet's see where this goes, but I am not too worried. If the worst case happens and that company gets taken over by big-evil-business, I am very confident that Godot will get forked by a new dev team and live happily ever after. It happened after OpenOffice got taken over by big-evil-business, too. The good thing about open source is that it's fairly immune against hostile takeovers.
In the best case, this could be a positive game-changer for Godot. While not everything the team will be working on will get upstreamed to Godot, I am sure that a lot of it will.
To keep it interesting for the investors I would guess the console market... so keeping that out of godot and as a payable add on, or something like that.
I do agree that forking OpenOffice in the longrun worked out, although I am not sure how that works for game engine's, the big gaming dev's tend to write a lot of in-house stuff against an engine to help there needs, a fork of a game engine which is used by companieswith self written add ons or bought add ons is diffrent from a fork of an office suit which we end users use.
Last edited by Bumadar on 13 September 2022 at 6:59 pm UTC
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Quoting: BumadarQuoting: KimyrielleLet's see where this goes, but I am not too worried. If the worst case happens and that company gets taken over by big-evil-business, I am very confident that Godot will get forked by a new dev team and live happily ever after. It happened after OpenOffice got taken over by big-evil-business, too. The good thing about open source is that it's fairly immune against hostile takeovers.
In the best case, this could be a positive game-changer for Godot. While not everything the team will be working on will get upstreamed to Godot, I am sure that a lot of it will.
To keep it interesting for the investors I would guess the console market... so keeping that out of godot and as a payable add on, or something like that.
I do agree that forking OpenOffice in the longrun worked out, although I am not sure how that works for game engine's, the big gaming dev's tend to write a lot of in-house stuff against an engine to help there needs, a fork of a game engine which is used by companieswith self written add ons or bought add ons is diffrent from a fork of an office suit which we end users use.
it should be an easier migration because (almost) every game engine user do know how to code, while not every office user do.
the average joe has no idea what an fork is, and if he face any problem during an migration he will be helpless the same cant be said about the average game developer.
the main issue would be use forks on consoles.
this company will support the official build of godot but im not sure about derivative codes.
Last edited by elmapul on 13 September 2022 at 11:19 pm UTC
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