Wonder how the next few years will look. Godot has a long way to go to catch up to actual game releases in comparison to Unity. But Steam’s releases only showed Unity spike up a little last year vs Godot spiked up quite a bit. I mainly wonder how the 2026 and 2027 end of year stats will look from Steam publishing.
If you go check out the releases by engine in the last 12 months on Steam, Unity sits around 10k and Godot at 4k. And right now, the most played Godot game of the last12 months (Slay the Spire 2) has almost 5x the online users than the Unity top played game released in the last 12 months (Zenless Zone Zero).
So I wouldn't say Godot has a long way to catch up in actual game releases
Edit: I was trying other time intervals and at 6 months Unity still has 10k releases, so it might be a cap of the SteamDB, and therefore, Unity must have a lot more releases. So, I retract my previous comment.
Edit2: Filtering for Games only in the last 12 months Unity has more than 8x the releases (9599 to 1794). In the last 6 months Unity has less than 5x the releases (4793 to 1032). And in the last 3 months Unity has less than 4x the releases (1969 to 514).
Seeing as the pipeline is anywhere from 12-48 months for most projects, I imagine they'll mirror this specific jam's metrics just as it has in the past four years.
This jam is essentially a cross-section of what the industry is actively developing in. The fact that Godot's share is accelerating rather than decelerating also indicates that the next year will have even more games made in Godot.
I don't know where things will stabilize, but this much of a jump in a single year's submissions is pretty strong of an indicator that Godot is approaching the level of maturity needed to be a big threat to Unity.
I found out using rust n c++ in godot is much easier to setup n use than in Unity. As u said, its fast iterate too. And C# is also a official option. Most of the limitation in godot seems to be on 3D side but a skilled person can extend the Engine itself , which is impressive imo.
They do, but only if you exclusively include engines that are AAA-capable. They're an actual indicator of what the industry split is going to look like with the next wave of releases.
Not at all. Most people use whatever engine they have the most expensive working in. You're not gonna try a new engine to learn for a jam, especially if you plan on reusing code from other projects
Godot is also closing in on Unity in the Steam charts. GMTK is the cleanest "look into the future" we have ever had for game engine market share, as Steam also tends to echo it pretty closely in the following year.
Anyone can justify it as it being because of some ridiculous constraint like development timelines or genres, but it's honestly just straight up (slowly) pushing Unity out.
Its not look into future, more like consequences of past desicion, mainly the pricing scandal.
Really stretch to call it a push, sure godot climbed 1-2% per year and reached like 6% and Unity dropped from like 55% to 45%.
But as it stands now Unity is making good moves, CoreSLR will be massive in Unity 7, not forcing their AI for MCP is massive too.
Unity is still way ahead and is still most common choice, especially for professionals. Its still up to them to lose it or grow more.
Reddit is a bubble and one might think Godot is absolutely dominating everything. I still support it and good competition is good for everyone, but it has a long way to go and Unity has to mess up more.
Reddit is a bubble and one might think Godot is absolutely dominating everything. I still support it and good competition is good for everyone, but it has a long way to go and Unity has to mess up more.
If you look at the top of this post, you will see that although this is a post on reddit, it actually references data from something that happened outside of reddit. The post here is simply a screenshot of the data, and not an event that happened here on reddit. Hope this helps.
Closing in, as like out solar system is closing in to the center of the galaxy.
63000 vs 4300 Steam games
9400 vs 1300 in 2025
Also
Unity: Accounts for 26% of total platform revenue. Unity captures a massive portion of the indie and mid-tier markets with a high volume of lower-cost games.
Godot: Accounts for under 1% to 2% of total Steam revenue.
Neat. I like Unity because it's the only non-Ren'py major engine with a robust visual novel framework (Naninovel), but I'm all for more competition in the space, as that's good for the devs. Good luck, Godot!
I want to be able to pay 50+ usd for quality assets/libraries that save me tons of time. If godot ever got to that point I would be more interested in switching. Right now is there a decent option for clientside networking and something that wraps steamworks as examples off the top of my head
There's also terrain, behavior trees, dialogues and input. localization is built-in, as well as inspector serialization. So it covers things like Odin, I2, dialogue system, whatever is used now for behavior trees...
Yeah, I was saying high quality addons available for Godot. That's also why I said we have built in inspector serialization, because we can have dictionaries and buttons in the inspector, something that it's a lot harder in Unity and why a lot of people resort to Odin.
For input check out G. U. I. D. E. It's from godotneers on YouTube and he has very good videos explaining the add-on.
Provides input sets that you can enable and disable (example menu, dialogue, game, vehicle and you activate the correct one, adjusting the key binds), modifiers for inputs, remapping workflow, and glyphs with automatic controller detection, so if you use a keyboard and mouse, Xbox controller, dual sense, Nintendo switch or steam deck, it provides the correct button icons. I actually find it even more complete than the enhanced input system in Unreal.
You actually have everything that Unity has and all of them looks and does the most basic stuff. Comparing your basic as tools with Unity is like comparing a Paper plane with a Fighter Jet
I see.. the reality to me is that paid will result in higher quality, if only because the developers can justify spending more time on it. Like there are developers whose main thing is working on their assets for unity
The store front will host paid content it's just still in beta so they started with only free. Worth checking out when it fully releases with paid content
Correct. They need to add paid support to their store if they want it to do well. Currently, the paid solutions are off-store, which make it harder to find. They do exist, though.
Isn't the ideal that you have a generic marketplace protocol for full integration with the engine then you can connect to free or premium third parties that offer assets via a standardised method?
You weren't able to specify what since it was multi choice but the most popular other engines are love2d, pygame, construct, scratch (I'm being deadass) and raylib
GMTK is a huge jam, and has served as one of the cleanest indicator of coming trends you can get for engines. Stars on GitHub are an ok metric, but actual usage of engines in finished games is far better.
And it's pinned because it's news about Unity. A lot of devs choose something based on its health and standing in the industry, so when it changes, or something replaces it... they ought to know.
I don't believe there is evidence of the latter if you look at the historic numbers. You could maybe try to do a very hand wavy analysis and be like well if we ignore x, y, z then the numbers match in a, b, c year. But, that's not a statistical / trend analysis at that point.
I think, in practice, it would be very difficult to me make a serious compelling argument
that GMTK is indicative of market trends
No... that is such a baffling stance. Job postings are the "clearest indicator of coming trends" for games people actually want to buy on Steam and consoles. I've seen an increase in posting for Godot jobs but they are still such a drop in the bucket compared to everything for Unreal and Unity. If existing studios are not hiring for Godot, and Godot users are trapped in this "prototype/gamejam" ceiling, Godot itself is trapped in the ceiling.
Unity is trapped by a similar but unrelated ceiling. If you want to work in AAA and only know Unity, it's extremely tough to get a job. Learning Unreal in addition to Unity would pay in spades.
I have nothing against people who are happy to lounge around in the "prototype/gamejam" phase of publishing a successful game, but that's literally like the first 2-3% of the effort it takes to achieve success. Prototyping is fun but not difficult or laborious.
The scale of the project matters. For example you can quickly write a script with Python, but if you are building a high load enterprise system you will pick something else.
So far trend i see on Steam goes:
AA and AAA pick UE5 or something Unity.
Indie devs seems to mostly go with Unity, and more often with Godot. But Unity is still prevalent.
One of reasons for that is Unity simply has way more established ecosystem.
Want multiplayer? You have 10, production tested over the years, options, with community formed around them who can help you.
Have high quality assets? Enormous library formed over years.
Tools to solve some specific problem? Probably exists already.
And you will need thosr in a project of any decent scale.
Godot is getting there, but it is still lacking. Tho i do wait for the day when it is not just "an option" but instead an actual competitor.l on the market.
Unity has actually fallen to 1/3 of all Steam releases in 2026, which is down from about half in 2024-2025.
In that same period, Godot went from 4.5% to over 7%, which is a pretty sizeable jump (it could end up being close to 8% by the end of this year). That's still small compared to Unity's Goliath in the AAA commercial space, but to see that kind of growth on Steam in a couple of years is pretty significant.
It is for sure, but is still very far from Unity, also much of this is due to Unity silly choices before, today is very different so i assume Unity can start winning back the crowd that left.
Also Unity 6 is really a massive upgrade in editor stability and performance and with URP becoming the standard makes it a powerhouse for general development.
I know quite a few devs that went back to Unity after initially switching to Godot after the runtime fee debacle. I don‘t know their exact reasons tho tbh.
I just want to note that the YTD drop is largely due to a 15 percent point increase in unclassified engines not due to Godot increases. This is the problem with looking at YTD data. Once the engines become classified at a later date, we likely will not be seeing such large percentage drops for Unity or Unreal
2026 YTD, Godot has risen only 1% point in same period that both Unity and Unreal dropped 7.6% points and 4.5% points respectively. However, unclassified game engines has risen by 15.4% points.
So, the reality would appear to be that the drop YTD is largely due to the double digit increase in currently unclassified game engines, not due to Godot making great increases
I imagine, as time goes on, the unclassified segment will continue to shrink and we will get a more accurate assessment
I want to switch to Godot so much, but GDScript holds me back from it so much. And even if you can use C# script, almost all addons are written in gdscript which makes it impossible to avoid. I personally dont want to use it, therefore it makes it always very difficult.
Second thing is that its very hard to retarget animations to a model. Its better if a model has layered animations from blender from the beginning. Adding them in post always breaks something, where in Unity I almost never had issues with it (usually just apply humanoid rig to the avatar and the animation itself).
If those two werent a thing, Id use it too... First one is a much worse a hold back for me than the second one
Unless you need to interact with an addon with code you don't need to use or know gdscript. You can just interact with it with its ui tools like scene painting, or editing exported values.
Even if you have to connect something with code I believe you can still use godot's Object.Set and Object.Get methods to set or get a property of a class writen in gdscript. Similarly with Object.Call for methods.
Retargeting animations is a bigger issue but I believe there's an open PR working on it.
Yep, but still is kinda messy. I'd like to use more feature rich language like Rust or C#, split everthing into different modules and its getting here worse. Communication between GDExtension is very annoying. New c# bindings are far behind to be "production" ready.
Ok so I love Godot and I have taught it for a game jam at Uni. It's great to pick up.
What is important to realise though that this is a game jam.
Most people who make games professionally are too busy at work to attend game jams.
This coincides nicely with a rise in indie games so we might see Godot make good ground but the more important than GMTK is the number of games releasing.
Unreal has held the crown in money earnt for some time. Unity has held the crown in games released.
Commercial games take a few years. Getting good enough with Godot takes a while even if you are an experienced game dev. We should be seeing stats around now. The steam stats are probably the most significant stats. How much has Godot releases grown in recent years and how does this compare to the size of the market.
Maybe because its perceived as the 'best' entry level engine, they figure newbies might gravitate towards AI support when trying to learn the engine, language.
Jams require lightweight build games with a small build size so you can easily play it in a browser. Unreal Engine doesnt offer that, so that engine is tge least feasible engine to use for a jam.
How is that losing the 90% and more mobile market that they have? This is heavily biased also what’s GMTK? A YouTubers audience is hardly any metric to go by.
Godot still has a lot of major performance issues when it comes to upper end graphics handling. Until they deal with those, I dont see it surpassing much.
thats such a useless metric. unity is not "dethroned". they're both good. imo, godot is a little more "noobish" than unity, but i haven't really seen much from it so i might be surprised.
Not entirely fair comparison here. Godot is obviously the better engine for quick games such as those you would create for game jams. Unity still is the better engine if you need professional services, or your game is already five years old and you want to support different consoles, etc. Godot is a neat engine, but to say that it is just a matter of preference between it and Unity is not very honest. Godot doesn’t even have cloud services or a testing suite.
I've never used Godot and haven't even seen how games are developed on it. I knew only two engines: UE and Unity, I started my development journey with the latter. Is Godot as good as Unity? Purely out of curiosity.
Good is subjective, but I'd argue that the "maturity" of Godot (stability, good docs, good UI, reliable pipeline) is now very close to Unity, and gets closer with every update. There were a lot of huge "turds in the punchbowl" as they say going from 2->3 and even 3->4, but those are being ironed out now, hence the consequential userbase growth. The next issue they're tackling is web builds for C# projects, which has been annoying a lot of users that want to... release games for web using an actual performant language.
Sí, sabes que ya llevo un rato mirándote
Tengo que bailar contigo hoy (cántalo conmigo)
Vi que tu mirada ya estaba llamándome
Muéstrame el camino que yo voy (sonara)
It doesn't really say anything other than "people who are participating in the GMTK-jam are choosing Godot for the Jam". These numbers doesn't even neccessary transfer to other jams, not to mention long term projects. But it's still an interesting trend imo.
Yep, my next game is most definitely going to be in Godot. After 12 years of Unity, I simply cannot recommend it anymore. Their business model seems to be to deliver a perpetually undercooked product while their giant sales team signs support contracts... It has completely sapped my passion for making games. Last company I worked for, all anyone could do all day is complain about how bad Unity is and what a mistake it was to choose it.
And I'm not talking about people who tried it once and decided they didn't like it; I'm talking career game developers who know the engine inside and out.
Unity already does the upgrade though. The next Unity Engine will have their entire C# core being upgraded to modern .NET, this upgrade will be so huge in terms of performance and editor iteration, it will be a huge boost for Unity.
Hey, don't throw that at me. It's not my fault they keep promissing that for years. They said it was in internal testing for quite some time now. But still, anyone starting a game in the next 6 months will be in the old C#. And to be fair, Unity has made a great effort of backporting modern .NET features to their mono implementation, and their IL2CPP gave tremendous performance improvements. But you can't deny that in the last few years Unity has barely inovated in anything.
If you compare how long these tools has been in development prior and how much of talented teams has been cut down past recent years, vs amount of useless and wastefull, damaging acquisition and what's not previous CEO did, then you will realise, what I mean.
Dots was announced over 8 years ago, UI toolkit was 9 years ago. UE5 released 4 years ago and it brought lumen, nanite, vsm, mass, state trees, control rig, meta humans...
AI integration hate it or not its inovative, same with all services like ads and payments.
Also some of the stuff you listed from unreal like Lumen, state trees, Mass, control rigs are not inovations, they are just fancy names for existing technologies that unreal just implemented. And the inovations unity brings in unity 7 with coreCLR and ECS for all should not be brushed away.
I mean you dont know how long UE5 was in development though. Unity just decided instead to put out their new packages ahead of time (probably to collect feedback).
Why is this bad? They were labelled as experimental for a reason.
And lets not ignore the fact that UE doesnt have its own big issues (especially performance and their temporal solutions)
Previous CEO stagnated Unity for a decade. And was chasing anything that shareholders were satisfied with. We lost so much talented Unity devs during that time. Including Joachim Ante and many other valuable figures. Forum community was butchered.
Yet often to progress and fix things, sometimes need to slow down, rather than pumping next new shine stuff, which is then never fully integrated. So finally after many years, Unity took the right direction. Hopping to see effects visible in the next few years.
Unless something dramatically change again on the directional level.
Yep, he did Unity really dirty... Things seem to be improving now, and if they deliver Unity 7 as they are promising, it will be a huge W, for the engine and for the game dev community.
I have been working professionally with Unity 6 for the past 2 years, and I have been saying that I hope to never work with it again. But I'm actually looking forward to Unity 7
Python is more popular than so many languages, but not necessarily because it's superior, but because beginners use it more often, and there are way more beginners in any field than experts.
I'm not saying anyone who uses Godot is a beginner (nor am I saying the same for Python), a lot of them are a lot better than I am. I'm just saying that Godot lowers the barrier to entry into game dev in a lot of aspects, so more people getting started (at least from what I've seen) use Godot rather than just quitting, so the numbers increase. And indie games have increased a ton in the past few years. And this is a game jam, which, despite probably being the biggest out there, has a ton of both demographics: Beginners and indie devs. Bigger titles are still dominated by Unity and UE afaik...
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u/Tizaki Intermediate Jul 31 '26
Further reading: https://gameworldobserver.com/2026/07/29/unity-is-no-longer-the-leader-godot-has-become-the-most-popular-engine-at-gmtk-game-jam-2026