Germany has significantly expanded its support for game development.

For 2026: around EUR 120M is available for the federal games funding programme itself, alongside regional funding programmes and the broader R&D tax incentive.

But these instruments support different types of projects and expenditure. For studios, understanding where they overlap and where they do not, is becoming increasingly important.

The federal games fund is becoming more predictable. One reason the current situation matters is historical.

The federal programme has gone through several periods in which new applications had to be suspended because available budgets were exhausted or future funding was uncertain. The German Games Industry Association has repeatedly identified predictability as one of the central requirements for making Germany internationally competitive as a development location.

The larger budgets for 2025 and 2026 are therefore an important development. The German Games Association itself has described the increase as a step towards making the programme better aligned with the actual needs of the German games industry. (Source)

There are still practical limits to who can use the programme:
Eligible projects require an investment volume of at least EUR 300K. Funding is available for prototypes and full productions as well as substantial DLCs, expansions, season passes and certain platform ports.

The general funding rate can reach 25% of eligible costs. Depending on the company, this can increase to as much as 45% for SMEs and 50% for Start-ups. The maximum grant is EUR 8M per project. The remaining financing has to come from non-subsidised sources. (Source)

For a well-capitalised production, those are meaningful numbers. For a small studio building a EUR 100K to 200K title, the federal programme simply is not designed to be the primary instrument. That distinction matters when discussing how much of the overall budget has been used.

The EUR 8M maximum is useful for understanding the scale the programme can theoretically support, but actual awards span a very wide range.

Recent 2026 decisions include grants of around EUR 140K for Gentle Troll Entertainment in Würzburg, EUR 170K for Alchemical Works in Mainz and around EUR 1.1M. for Gamexcite in Hamburg.

At the larger end, Torpor Games has received around EUR 2.2M for The Conformist, Egosoft more than EUR 3M for its X29 project, Weltenbauer around EUR 3.7M for Project Nexus, while several major projects from previous funding rounds are above EUR 5M. The largest currently listed project is Rockfish Games’ Multispace at EUR 8M. (⁠Source)

Federal funding is only one part of the picture.

Below the federal level, there is a substantial network of regional programmes.
In July, for example, FFF Bayern awarded EUR 871K across 16 concepts, prototypes and productions. That included solo developers as well as established studios and illustrates an important difference between federal and regional funding: state programmes can often support substantially smaller projects. (Source) For studios, the key is finding the right funding instrument for the project’s size, stage and scope.

There is another instrument that is relevant to technical game development.

Alongside games-specific funding, studios may also be able to use Germany’s R&D tax incentive, the Forschungszulage. (Programme Link) This isn’t a replacement for games funding. It covers a different part of the development process: qualifying technical R&D.

For studios doing substantial technical work, for example in rendering, simulation, AI or custom development tools, it can therefore be worth looking at both.

The Forschungszulage is a statutory tax incentive rather than a competitive grant. From 2026, the annual assessment base is EUR 12M, with a rate of up to 35% for qualifying SMEs. There is no minimum project size, and applications for certification can be made before, during or after the R&D work.

What can qualify in game development?
Not every difficult development task is R&D. A difficult implementation isn’t enough. The question is whether the team was trying to solve a technical problem where the solution wasn’t known in advance. And whether that work was approached systematically.

Potential examples include new rendering approaches, networking and synchronisation solutions, procedural-generation technology, simulation or physics systems, and custom technical infrastructure where established solutions are insufficient.

Routine implementation, content production, level design, asset creation, localisation, marketing and regular QA will generally not qualify on their own.

The two instruments can also be combined. The important restriction is that the same cost cannot be funded twice, so the cost split needs to be clear from the outset.

Austria has a similar R&D route.

Austria combines various public funding programmes with the Forschungsprämie, a tax incentive worth 14% of qualifying R&D expenditure. (Programme Link)

As in Germany, it is not a general subsidy for developing a game. But for studios carrying out genuine technical R&D, it can form a valuable part of the overall funding mix.

Good documentation makes the difference!
It doesn’t matter which instrument is most relevant, studios benefit from documenting technical development as it happens.

For R&D incentives in particular, records should make it possible to understand the technical problem, what was uncertain at the outset, which approaches were tested, who worked on them and how the work progressed.

Much of this information may already exist in project management, issue tracking and time-recording systems. Structuring it early is considerably easier than reconstructing it later.

What studios should consider?

The funding landscape for game development is broader than a single programme. Depending on the project, a studio may have access to federal games funding, regional programmes and R&D incentives and these instruments can sometimes complement each other.

For a studio planning its next project, it is important to ask if the production fit the federal or regional games funding programme/s, if the technical development could qualify as R&D and if the costs are documented well.

Find out where you stand
Because eligibility is genuinely hard to judge from the outside, we built a small, free tool that gives you a first sense of whether your project might qualify: a few short questions, an initial AI-supported assessment in minutes, no registration or contact details required. It is not a binding evaluation, but it is an honest first filter.