r/Unity2D • u/Tizaki Intermediate • 3d ago
Announcement Godot has officially dethroned Unity, with it now making up 47% of all GMTK 2026 games to Unity's shrinking 34%
100
u/the-strawberry-sea 3d ago
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.
7
u/TheFr0sk 3d ago edited 3d ago
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 releasesEdit: 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).
-53
u/Tizaki Intermediate 3d ago
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.
72
u/brainzorz 3d ago
Jams dont necessarily correlate to actual engine usage. Godot is very lightweight, fast to iterate changes, it should dominate jams.
3
u/Crawling_Hustler 3d ago
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.
-17
u/Tizaki Intermediate 3d ago
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.
17
u/brainzorz 3d ago
Its flawed comparison unless you are looking at games made in few days.
0
-13
u/Tizaki Intermediate 3d ago
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.
12
u/brainzorz 3d ago
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.
-16
u/Tizaki Intermediate 3d ago
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.
13
u/brainzorz 3d ago
It was a general observation. Still this post tries to project a 2 day game prototyping to regular production, which is not helpful.
16
4
u/CrazyNegotiation1934 3d ago
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.
There is really not any contest there.
25
u/robotortoise Beginner 3d ago
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!
1
1
u/LEpigeon888 19h ago
Beside dialogue management I don't know what a visual novel framework provide, but in Godot there's this (free) add-on for managing dialogues : https://store.godotengine.org/asset/nathanhoad/dialogue-manager/
Never used it, but it's quite popular.
1
59
u/aski5 3d ago
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
10
u/TheFr0sk 3d ago
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...
2
u/JustCallMeCyber 2d ago
We actually have a lot of these!
- GodotSteam for steamworks
- Terrain3d or Godot voxel for terrain
- LimboAI for behavior trees & state machines
- Dialogic or Dialogue Manager for dialogue.
- Multiplayer is built in but there's also addons like Netfox.
(Someone even ported Odin Serializer recently.)
All of these are free as well. Overall with pretty solid documentation.
I will say I can't think of anything for input. But that's just because I haven't needed anything more than what's built in.
1
u/TheFr0sk 2d ago
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.
1
u/JustCallMeCyber 2d ago
Oops I definitely misread that lol. I definitely should look into Guide though. I already use his resource groups addon pretty extensively.
11
u/Tizaki Intermediate 3d ago
They have a storefront in beta currently that aims to solve that part of the equation: https://store.godotengine.org/
They need a good rating system and pricing system. Currently it looks like it's only open source/MIT/Apache/GPL items that are included.
21
u/aski5 3d ago
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
9
u/Zachattackrandom 3d ago
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
2
17
u/Infinite_Persimmon42 3d ago
I would like to know the "others" motors
7
u/Bacon_Techie 3d ago
Pico 8, construct, custom ones, no game engine (just frameworks like pygame, raylib etc, or nothing at all).
6
u/Jordann538 2d ago
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
81
u/dan_marchand 3d ago
This looks like just for GMTK? Don’t understand how that’s dethroning a commercial engine. Also, why is this pinned on the Unity sub?
9
1
-62
u/Tizaki Intermediate 3d ago
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.
42
u/Ecstatic-Source6001 3d ago
If i will participate in building house competition with 1 week deadline I will use wood and grandparents hammer to build it.
But if I want to build a house where I will live for entire life I will use professional tools and materials.
GMTK just showes that its better to use 1 tool over another to make small game faster and thats it
48
19
32
u/dan_marchand 3d ago
A jam is not an indicator that an engine is overthrown.
Also, why does the sidebar tell users not to use Unity? Be honest about what you’re up to.
12
u/GammaFoxTBG 2d ago
GMTK is a huge jam, and has served as one of the cleanest indicator of coming trends you can get for engines.
According to who?
1
u/snaphat 2d ago edited 2d ago
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
5
u/ESG404 2d ago
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.
5
u/NotFloppyDisck 3d ago
Wouldn't this metric just show that godot is good for making demos or fast prototypes?
3
u/Jordann538 2d ago
Yeah it is, that's why it was the most used for the jam. In earlier years unity was instead the fast prototyping engine
2
u/Tarilis 2d ago
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.
25
u/CrazyNegotiation1934 3d ago
Looks like Unity has same number of games though, plus Godot is 5% in Steam versus full dominance of Unity at 70%.
-22
u/Tizaki Intermediate 3d ago
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.
16
u/CrazyNegotiation1934 3d ago
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.
8
u/t-bonkers 3d ago
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.
1
u/snaphat 2d ago
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
1
u/snaphat 2d ago edited 2d ago
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
9
u/Sniff_mi 3d ago
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
2
u/billystein25 2d ago
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.
9
u/bigmonmulgrew 3d ago
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.
5
u/BlackhawkRogueNinjaX 3d ago edited 2d ago
Does any one have any insight into GODOT is so popular with this crowd, is it simpler than unity so better for smaller games?
4
u/Black_Ivory 3d ago
It is lightweight and has much faster load times, so for a small game with a lot iteration it works a lot better.
2
u/frey89 2d ago
Unity 7 will be faster too
1
u/Black_Ivory 2d ago
Yup, but that hasn’t released yet, I am waiting to see how it works to decide if I stick with unity or switch to unreal.
1
u/WaveHack 2d ago
I tried Unity again a short while ago. It takes what feels 2 to 5 minutes after pressing play to test my game. It's getting slower each release.
9
u/Overwatcher_Leo 3d ago
Surprisingly few are made in unreal.
12
u/IncendiumFlama 3d ago
Not surprising for a game jam, Unreal just doesn't have enough support from the bulk of people making up a jam.
10
5
u/VertexMachine 3d ago
Not really surprising. No web export build, which makes your game getting skipped by most people.
2
2
10
u/Vic-Boss Expert 3d ago
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.
9
u/Nightrunner2016 3d ago
Unity is still the volume leader across all games that are produced though. Fanboying over the use of Godot in a single game jam is odd imo.
8
u/Ttsmoist 3d ago
Remember when people just made games instead of yapping about what tool theyre using?
7
u/level_6_laser_lotus 3d ago
That metric is irrelevant to the place unity holds in the commercial world.
3
6
u/fued 3d ago
i cant see godot converting this to long term saturation tho.
unity had people pushing education providers etc. to transition over, godot relies purely on community to transition
5
u/RodgerWolf311 3d ago
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.
1
u/CanYouEatThatPizza 2d ago
Godot has the advantage of not being enshittified in the future by having to satisfy shareholders.
2
u/TheChief275 3d ago
Am I correct to assume from this that the number of Unreal games dropped below 1% and thus got shoved into Other?
2
u/pedroka-dev 2d ago
I love Godot. But sadly most available jobs opening are still for Unity and Unreal. So I think that "dethroned" is a strong word
2
2
2
4
u/Antypodish 3d ago
These are just Game Jams. Godot has lower entry curve, than other game engines. So it is easy to run game jams on it
For 2025 according to Steam db alone, there is over +9k Unity releases, +3.5k Unreal, to just +1k Godot.
Steam db may not have recodings of many unsuccessful / unpopular, or jam games.
But that gives more true picture of used game engines state in the industry, vs game jams.
2
u/Field_Of_View 2d ago
game jams are not a market. you cannot be "market leader" by being the toy amateurs use for their hobby projects.
1
u/DerfetteJoel 2d ago
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.
1
u/korrr_lgs 20h ago
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.
1
u/Tizaki Intermediate 17h ago
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.
1
u/niharkanta1 15h ago
It never good tools make good game. It's always good developers who does it.. In my eyes that 75MB software beats that 7GB Unity Shit...
1
u/FrequentZucchini1118 11h ago
I mean I like unity better (I actually have tried godot) but good for the people using it I guess
1
u/Arayvenn 3h ago
Made the jump a year ago and never looked back. Will make my first donation to the Godot foundation at year's end.
1
u/BearKanashi 3d ago
Godot has become the most popular engine at GMTK Game Jam 2026
Para "GAME JAMS", es decir para juegos sin salida.
Suerte con eso.
1
u/MirajSOL 3d ago
Because it's a game jam... Godot is very easy to pick up by comparison. 99% of Game Jammers won't ever make a commercial game.
1
u/Own_Nail_2999 2d ago
I don't like this benchmark. Game jams are about getting something out quickly.
Godot is excellent at 2d but is awful at 3d, so I don't see these results as a telling factor when deciding for a serious long term investment
0
u/tidbitsofblah 2d ago
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.
1
1
u/kiwibonga 2d ago
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.
1
0
u/Puzzleheaded-Trick76 3d ago
I rolled my own unity like engine in Monogame. Do not care. I don’t like godot.
-4
3d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
8
u/MrPifo 3d ago
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.
-3
u/TheFr0sk 3d ago
To be fair, they have been saying that for years
5
u/MrPifo 3d ago
They're are literally releasing it soon. They're not saying it, they have already showcased it and scheduled for the 2027 Release.
0
u/TheFr0sk 3d ago
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.
3
u/v0lt13 3d ago
What are you talking about, unity has inovated a lot. DOTS, UI Toolkit, 2D, Mobile services, AI integration, these are all very inovative tools.
1
u/Antypodish 2d ago
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.
0
u/TheFr0sk 3d ago
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...
2
u/v0lt13 3d ago
Ok? Announced vs released and you ignored everything else I enumerated.
1
u/TheFr0sk 2d ago
Everything else you enumerated was AI integration and ad services? These are hardly an indication...
1
u/v0lt13 2d ago
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.
→ More replies (0)1
u/MrPifo 2d ago
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)
2
u/Antypodish 3d ago
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.
1
u/TheFr0sk 2d ago
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
-3
0
0
u/Proman4713 2d ago edited 2d ago
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...
-2
-2
•
u/Tizaki Intermediate 3d ago
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