VGI Video The Big Game Engine Report of 2025 Game Insights End of the Era of In-House Engines CONHNES Supporting creativity through data VGinsights.com Contact: [email protected]

Table of Contents State of Game Engines 5-7 Game Engine Market Share Trends 8-12 Deep Dive – Unreal Engine 13-15 Deep Dive – Smaller Public Engines 16-17 Game Engines Popularity by Genre 18-19

Game engines space has been changing rapidly with strong established public engines winning share from historically dominant custom game engines Overview of the Report CRYENGINE@ Unity source Overview: • This report explores the game engines used in games released on Steam over time. Summary • Unity, Unreal Engine and custom game engines of large AAA studios continue to dominate the game engine market. FROSTBITE • However, the trends have been shifting significantly over the last 10 years, especially so in the last 5. • Unreal Engine is quickly winning share from custom engines, becoming the go to game engine for many AAA studios. • Unity has also started to see an impact as UE5 competes with Unity over simplicity and user experience, often becoming the preferred platform even among indie developers. GODOT Methodology Game engine • The methodology relies on VGI’s estimations and tagging of games against game engines. The final slides of the report delve more into methodology. • We capture game engine data for over 13,000 games on Steam. UNREAL Gam TM

This report looks at 3 groups of game engines – from the industry leaders to smaller open-source projects Key Game Engines Covered in the Report Tier 1 Unreal Engine and Unity have been the dominant publicly available Unity Public Engines third-party game engines for a long time UNREAL ENGINE Tier 2 Other third-party game engines have a significantly smaller market GameMaker TM Public Engines share, but are often used by indie developers GODOT erᵀᴹ Ren'Py visual novel engine Game engine Custom In-House Game In-house engines are proprietary tools built by large developers for rce ource CREATION Engines their specific needs ENGINE DECIMA

Over half of the games released in 2024 were made in Unity, but only 26% of the units sold as Unreal Engine and custom AAA engines dominate large games Overview of Game Engine Popularity on Steam in 2024 Number of Games Released All Units Sold in 2024 Commentary: in 2024 by Game Engine by Game Engine¹ • Unity is still the dominant game engine in terms of sheer volume of games being released on 10% • Steam 2% 26% Unity However, in terms of actual units sold, both 4% Unreal Engine custom in-house engines as well as Unreal 5% • Engine beat Unity in 2024 41% Godot Godot, RPG Maker, GameMaker and other 51% GameMaker similar public engines count for just over 10% of all games released, but barely 2% of the actual Ren’Py units sold on Steam 28% 0% Other² 1% 31% 1% Notes: Data includes only games that have sold at least 1 000 units over their lifetime. Games with almost no sales would distort the picture

Smaller games still skew heavily towards Unity while larger end of the market gets increasingly dominated by custom game engines Game Engine Mix by Size of Games All Units Sold in 2024 by Game Engine by Game Size Commentary: Tiny Games (Under 1k Units) 50% 23% 13% 14% • Smaller games, especially indie titles, are more likely to be built in Unity. Godot and GameMaker also do relatively well in that space. • Notably, Unity and Unreal Engine have strong presence in every size category of games. Small Games (1k-100k Units) 48% 27% 6% 19% • Larger game studios have built their internal engines for over ten years and still continue to rely on them heavily. Medium Games (100k-1M Units) 35% 32% 5% 29% Large Games (1M+ Units) 22% 31% 1% 46% ~~Unity~~ ~~Unreal Engine~~ ~~Godot & GameMaker~~ Other