Tencent has led an $18m Series B into W4 Games, founded by the creators of the open-source Godot Engine

Ireland-based game engine developer W4 Games has raised $18.0m in a Series B led by Tencent (SEHK: 700), with existing backers OSS Capital, Lux Capital, Naval Ravikant and Tobias Lütke’s family office. Announced on Aug 25, 2026, it includes a multi-year strategic partnership with Tencent to scale W4’s business and the Godot ecosystem in Asia, covering go-to-market, localization, ecosystem support, advocacy, and market development among developers in the region. Proceeds would also fund a 50% increase in W4’s international team, about 30 people today across around 20 cities, with 10 to 15 full-time hires planned over the next 12 months.

W4 puts total funding raised to date at $33m, comprising its $15.0m Series A in Dec’23 plus this round. Its $8.5m Seed of Sep’22, which W4 announced earlier, is not in that figure, and including it brings the all-in total to $41.5m.

W4 was founded in 2021 in Dublin by Godot creator Juan Linietsky, project manager Rémi Verschelde, Fabio Alessandrelli, and Nicola Farronato, with Linietsky and Farronato as co-CEOs. Today, the company sells W4 Consoles, approved porting middleware for Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5, alongside engine consulting, XR integration and enterprise support. Godot itself is a free, MIT-licensed game engine operated by the Godot Foundation, a Dutch non-profit organization.

Godot’s adoption is what the round is underwriting, and it compounds. Titles shipped on Steam roughly quadrupled between 2023 and 2025, and 2026 matched the whole of 2025 in the first eight months. At GMTK Game Jam 2026 in Jul’26, Godot took 47% of roughly 10,500 entries against Unity’s 34%, the first time in ten runs that Unity was not the most-used engine there. According to Gamalytic data, the number of Godot games with more than $1m in annual sales has increased from 2 to more than 50 over three years. Some well-known games built on the Godot engine include: 

• Slay the Spire 2, sequel to one of the genre’s defining deckbuilders, entered Steam Early Access on Godot in Mar’26 and peaked at ~575k concurrent players, the 20th-highest all-time Steam peak; 
• According to Alinea Analytics, Buckshot Roulette, also built in Godot, has sold more than 10 million copies across PC and Xbox since its Dec’23 debut.

One of its competitors, US-based Unity Software, reported Q2’26 Strategic Create revenue (the Create Solutions segment, covering Unity Editor licenses, developer subscriptions, and related engine tools) of $157.5m, up 5% YoY as reported, or 14% excluding a $12m one-off item in the Q2’25 base, the engine line Godot competes with. Godot’s Steam ramp begins the year after Unity’s Sep’23 runtime-fee pricing change, which cost Unity 19% of its value in ten days and was later canceled outright. 

Farronato told GamesBeat that the China opportunity exists “in part because Unity decided to pull out,” and told GamesIndustry.biz that W4 chose Tencent for its Asian ecosystem rather than the size of the offer: “It’s not only about the money. It’s about being really willing to develop strategic activities together.” Unity 6 has been unavailable in China since Apr’25. Chinese developers get a separate local build instead, through the joint venture Unity formed there in 2022, and Bloomberg reported in Feb’26 that Unity was weighing a sale of that China business at more than $1B. China and Japan are Godot’s second-largest markets by active users after the United States. Tencent also owns a stake in Epic Games, the maker of the rival Unreal Engine: about 40%, bought for $330m in 2012. Farronato’s only on-record answer is that Tencent is a minority investor and does not control it.

Another relevant deal in the game engine segment is SUD’s $72m purchase of Cocos Technologies, the developer of Cocos Creator, in Nov’25. InvestGame will continue to monitor deal activity in the game engine market.