The interest around multiplayer games and online experiences have been steadily growing for over a decade, rapidly increasing the pace in the last few years. Signs of this can be found in both the general market and Godot’s own community polls.
Yet making multiplayer experiences exposes game developers to a whole new set of challenges, from game state synchronization and latency compensation, to game and infrastructure servers for matchmaking and to persist players and game data.
Godot has been suitable for creating dedicated servers since its early versions due to support for displayless builds, which was complemented later on with the introduction of dedicated multiplayer features like peer notification, server relay, and messaging via RPCs over a wide variety of network protocols (ENet/WebSocket/WebRTC).
With the release of Godot 4.0, game state synchronization features were added to the engine, with further improvements already planned for the near future.
Yet there is only so much an engine can do to ease the development of multiplayer games without providing some form of online service for player accounting, matchmaking, data storage, and server hosting. This is something game developers have come to expect from game engines, but it has not been possible with Godot due to the non-profit nature of the Godot Foundation.
Enter W4 Cloud
In line with our goal of strengthening the Godot ecosystem, we have been relentlessly working to develop a set of online services deeply integrated with Godot Engine, aimed at augmenting the multiplayer experience for both developers and players.
The services are designed to assist during the entire development phase and to streamline the process of releasing the game to the general public without having to engineer complex network infrastructure.
This includes:
- Flexible hosting: P2P with signaling server, on-demand scalable authoritative server, programmable serverless backend.
- Lobbies & matchmaking.
- User and player management: Authentication with platform accounts, moderation.
- Data storage for both game and player data: Leaderboards, player profiles, persistent world data, etc.
- Resource storage: DLCs, user generated content, etc.
- Marketing & performance analytics.
Pricing model
Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for everyone to create and share their multiplayer games online, regardless of their experience or resources. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to bring their visions to life, and our pricing model reflects that.
We aim to offer a tiered subscription plan that starts at a very reasonable price point, with the flexibility to scale as your game grows and evolves.
Join the private beta
To ensure that our service meets the needs of the Godot community, we are seeking out experienced users with published games to participate in our private beta program. Your feedback will help us refine and improve our service, making it more accessible and useful to everyone.
If you’re interested in joining us on this journey, check out our Early Access Blogpost .
Learn more about W4 Games and Godot Engine: