How W4 plans to monetize the Godot game engine using Red Hat’s open-source playbook

techcrunch.com:

A new company from the creators of the Godot game engine is setting out to grab a piece of the $200 billion global video game market — and to do so, it’s taking a cue from commercial open source software giant Red Hat.

Godot, for the uninitiated, is a cross-platform game engine first released under an open source license back in 2014, though its initial development pre-dates that by several years. Today, Godot claims some 1,500 contributors, and is considered one of the world’s top open source projects by various metrics. Godot has been used in high-profile games such as the Sonic Colors: Ultimate remaster, published by Sega last year as the first major mainstream game powered By Godot. But Tesla, too, has apparently used Godot to power some of the more graphically-intensive animations in its mobile app.

Among Godot’s founding creators is Juan Linietsky, who has served as head of development for the Godot project for the past 13 years, and who will now serve as CEO of W4 Games, a new venture that’s setting out to take Godot to the next level.

W4 quietly exited stealth last week, but today the Ireland-headquartered company has divulged more details about its goals to grow Godot and make it accessible for a wider array of commercial use-cases. On top of that, the company told TechCrunch that it has raised $8.5 million in seed funding to make its mission a reality, with backers including OSS Capital; Lux Capital; Sisu Game Ventures; and — somewhat notably — Bob Young, the cofounder and former CEO of Red Hat, an enterprise-focused open-source company that IBM went on to acquire for $34 billion in 2019.

But first… what is a game engine, exactly?

Godot editor demo

In simple terms, a game engine serves up the basic building blocks