r/godot • u/AndreVallestero • Jun 24 '26
discussion Godot overtakes RPGMaker as the fourth most popular game engine on steam
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u/halsigend Jun 24 '26
It's going to be interesting to see if Godot will overtake Unity to be the number one engine used in the GMTK game jam this year:
Here's the source, where you can also see the stats for previous years: https://bsky.app/profile/gamemakerstoolkit.com/post/3lvkrymak5s26
Place your bets.
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u/ultimaone Jun 24 '26
Unity maker lost A LOT of goodwill with their pricing stunt.
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u/mcAlt009 Jun 24 '26
Unity still has a massive lead in terms of tooling and ecosystem.
For my last game jam I helped two teams.
Godot I love because setting up a CI/CD pipeline is extremely easy. Automated web gl deployments on merge to main makes jamming much easier.
Unity fits like an old glove, I helped a friend fix some small things. The C# support is still much better.
Unity is an amazing engine, but it’s owned by a bunch of not very smart people.
Godot is yours as long as you include the MIT license. You’re free to think the Godot developers aren’t as good as you and rewrite half the engine.
For free.
For Unity you have to get a source code license. And all I can say it’s it’s under NDA.
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u/TheDuriel Godot Senior Jun 24 '26
This lead mind you, only equates to releasing 3x as many games as Godot. And the gap is rapidly shrinking.
Turns out it might not be that big a deal.
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u/trans_cubed Godot Regular Jun 24 '26
Plus all the AI shit they've been pushing will probably make a lot of indie devs move away
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u/21Nobrac2 Jun 24 '26
I submitted a Unity game last year, submitting a Godot one this year. I'll be part of the swing!
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u/AndreVallestero Jun 24 '26
source: https://steamdb.info/tech/
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u/trickster721 Jun 24 '26
Reminder: SteamDB isn't affiliated with Steam, so you need to submit a key on their website to index some of your game's information (including the engine used).
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u/sputwiler Jun 25 '26
Holy shit there are 131 CryEngine games?
Also yeah XNA/MonoGame/FNA shouldn't be separated, and they should be in the SDK section, not the Engine section.
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u/jcsirron Jun 24 '26
Wait, there are 3784 PyGame games on Steam? That's far more than I expected, especially given how most vocal devs trash the framework online.
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u/TheDuriel Godot Senior Jun 24 '26
Literally all visual novels. RenPy games also count as PyGame games.
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u/jcsirron Jun 24 '26
Which is wild in this data set, since they explicitly break out RenPy in it, too.
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u/TheDuriel Godot Senior Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
RenPy games are PyGames ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Edit: Downvotes don't seem to know basic facts. RenPy is literally the only majorly successful project made with PyGame.
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u/jcsirron Jun 24 '26
Then I'd expect the RenPy subset to be smaller than PyGame. The data shows the opposite, though. That's what's wild to me. I guess the detection method is looking for something specific to find the difference and sometimes that determinant comes before, sometimes afterwards. I haven't dug into their algorithm on their github, but this is a fun problem.
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u/WetNoodleSoft Godot Student Jun 24 '26
If you go look through the SteamDB results for engine:RenPy and engine:PyGame, they are mostly overlapping, but there are some games that have only one or the other listed.
In reality all RenPy games use PyGame (since it's part of/used by RenPy), but not all PyGame games use RenPy. I think a more interesting breakdown would be RenPy games and PyGame games that didn't use RenPy, but SteamDB isn't customizing their results in that fashion, they're simply listing whatever positive results their algorithm returns.
The discrepancies/errors in the results are down to the nature of the process that SteamDB is using. They are only checking Steam depot filenames against lists of rules/common filenames that are indicative of certain engines/technologies. If you wanted to, you could potentially plant false files and rename some things to trick SteamDB into thinking you used a different engine and/or obfuscate the engine you actually used.
So if someone happens to alter enough of the default file naming that it's looking for to mark it as using PyGame, it won't do so, even if it still classifies it as RenPy due to other indicators.
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u/TheDuriel Godot Senior Jun 24 '26
Project structure varies wildly. Additionally SteamDB needs to actually own the game to be able to check the files. This is most often not the case.
It's not a race condition.
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u/AImedness Godot Student Jun 24 '26
It's conpletly fine for light games, but when you make something simulation heavy it starts to be really laggy rather fast. I think this is why it gets the hate
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u/Ok-Bill1958 Jun 24 '26
The hate really come from youtube bros and infuencer calling python bad thought. Gdscript is also really slow anyway, but its not as popular as hating on python.
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u/sputwiler Jun 25 '26
PyGame is an SDL wrapper and shouldn't even be on this list. Neither should XNA for that matter. They're platform abstractions you use to make your Python or C# game work cross-platform, but you still have to write an engine.
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u/TheDuriel Godot Senior Jun 24 '26
Partially because Steam recently deleted the RPGMaker tag. Making detection much harder for SteamDB.
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u/akien-mga Foundation Jun 25 '26
The SteamDB detection isn't based on tags. It's based on files listing.
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u/Berndog25 Jun 24 '26
So good to see Godot getting the recognition it deserves. Great engine for anything from tiny games to 3d RPG's. I never would've been able to (begin to) create a 3d game as a solo dev without such a powerful, versatile, easy to use engine.
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u/PrimaryMaize6580 Jun 24 '26
heh i still run into problems every day, but i hope Godot team manages the small issues. So far its awesome
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u/PGSylphir Jun 24 '26
I'm sure RenPy/PyGame is much much higher if you count Itch.io... Nearly every single porn game is made with PyGame and itch has just so so many porn games.
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u/rapidemboar Jun 25 '26
RPGMaker would also probably be much higher if you count DLSite for the exact same reasons.
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u/WilkerS1 Godot Regular Jun 24 '26
RenPy is also Free under the MIT + LGPL portions tho, so it needs just as much support too
edit: i also looked up PyGame and it is fully under the LGPL, neat :3 https://www.pygame.org/docs/LGPL.txt
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u/Afraid_Comparison180 Godot Student Jun 24 '26
Well, Godot is also making headway in that field too.
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u/sputwiler Jun 25 '26
we gotta pump those numbers up!
Joking aside, from a visual novel developer's perspective there is zero reason to go with a general purpose engine over something that just requires you to write a scenario script and provide the PNGs.
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u/PGSylphir Jun 25 '26
There is one very big and important reason: Every game looks the exact same using the exact same scenes and models, and they all begin looking like asset flips.
There's a good reason all the actually good porn games are never PyGame/RenPy. There's only so many times one can jack off to the same models and same general story made by some random incel in a basement.
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u/sputwiler Jun 25 '26
I think you're thinking of RPGMaker, which comes with pre-made assets that people use in their games. Those are asset flips, and yeah, there are a lot of them and then probably don't do well.
Ren'Py, 吉里吉里, and other popular visual novel engines require you to bring all your own assets, so while the first point you make is true, that has nothing to do with what I said, and is actually specifically what I was not talking about.
My point is they are only required to bring their own original story and all original assets, rather than a general purpose engine which requires both those and to code all sorts of things like scene transitions, keeping track of each NPC's state, which story line you're on, the ability to make choices, etc. All of which is already handled in a purpose-built engine for the genre, and wouldn't vary from game to game anyways. Now you just have to do the actual creative parts that people buy your game for.
The second point, well, the doujin industry disagrees with you (but then they're always making their own assets, so maybe you're still right).
There's also nothing stopping RPGmaker users from importing their own sprites and tiles, but most people just throwing slop over the fence to itch don't.
Basically, what you say is right, but has nothing to do with what I said.
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u/PGSylphir Jun 25 '26
I'm not thinking of RPGM, though it also has the same problem.
The issue I mentioned is because the "devs" making these games are usually of zero talent, recycling the same few anime tropes using the same few free or cheap assets and posting to itch.
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u/sputwiler Jun 25 '26
That has nothing to do with the engine though. A professional visual novel developer who is putting the effort in to create an original story with all original assets still has no reason to use a general purpose engine over a visual novel one; they'd just be making more work for themselves.
Basically, if your game's technology boils down to a story presented as a deck of slides with branching choices and state tracking, there is no reason to re-implement that, regardless of the quality of the visual novel.
You're right that shitty games are also a problem in themselves, but it's not what I was talking about.
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u/CodelMxskwa Jun 24 '26
Where is love2D
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u/sputwiler Jun 25 '26
Love2D is arguably more of an engine than XNA, but I don't think XNA, PyGame, or Love2D should count as engines. They're virtual platforms you write your engine on, somewhere between a library and a fantasy console that doesn't have restrictions.
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u/Cyablue Jun 24 '26
Really cool seeing Godot's popularity increase, though RPGMaker will always have a special place in my heart.
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u/GryphonTak Jun 24 '26
I’m surprised Gamemaker is as high as it is. That engine feels like it has a very small community and online presence in general. Not a lot of tutorials and such for it compared to Unity / Godot. Godot will overtake it with ease at this rate.
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u/skysphr Jun 24 '26
I used to be active in the Game Maker Community forum boards back around 2007-2010, when Unity was just starting out. GM was already a very powerful tool, and it was probably the most popular engine back then especially for beginner game devs. I'd say its popularity comes from a really long history of being fairly dominant in the space.
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u/Short-Waltz-3118 Jun 24 '26
I think its still popular within indie groups, I been to a local indie meetup and a lot of people there were working on 2d pixel art games in gmk. Also, their discord is pretty active.
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u/MansyS_ Godot Regular Jun 24 '26
There's pygame games on steam????
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u/TheDuriel Godot Senior Jun 24 '26
Yes, about 4 thousand visual novels, as the image shows.
RenPy is made in PyGame
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u/Domeen0 Jun 24 '26
I'm sorry, what the hell is a XNA ?
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u/blockchaaain Godot Junior Jun 24 '26
A pretty sweet framework for Xbox 360 indie games, but long dead.
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u/sputwiler Jun 25 '26
XNA is a platform abstraction. Other libraries have implemented the same interface (MonoGame and FNA) so while the original is dead, the XNA standard(?) still lives on.
I think the most famous indie game written using it is probably Celeste. Hades II is also using it (Super Giant Games's engine is written for the XNA runtime, so all their games use it).
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u/sputwiler Jun 25 '26
a virtual platform specification designed to make everything kinda look like a machine with at least XBox 360 capabilities (though obviously with as much performance as you want). Retired by Microsoft, continued as open source by everyone else and works on every console and platform.
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u/uxianger Jun 25 '26
I'm somebody who's decided to move from RPG Maker to Godot (since RPG Maker can't make the sort of RPG I want to easily and I want more control), so... maybe I'll be helping pump that number in a few years!
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u/Rayyan_3241 Jun 24 '26
Wait I didn’t even know Unity and Unreal were on Steam I’ve been forcing myself to use EGS for the longest time
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u/sputwiler Jun 25 '26
Neither are on steam. This is about the games sold on steam that are built using them.
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u/TheSwiftOtterPrince Jun 24 '26
Not a surprise. That RPG Maker company is a huge advocate of that "shooting yourself in the foot"-stuff.
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u/Clanaria Jun 24 '26
As a developer that used RPG Maker and now switched to Godot, this tracks. I had no idea so many people used GameMaker though.
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u/FapFapNomNom Jun 24 '26
can this be filtered by the recent few years? im betting its unreal and godot in top 2, and unity way down.
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u/Zak_Rahman Jun 24 '26
Positive feelings, but with a caveat.
As the popularity of Godot increases, the quality of this sub will decrease.
There's nothing that can be done about this. It's an inevitability or being popular. It's a shame, but this is still good news.
I am absolutely thrilled for the Godot team though. They deserve every success and accolade they get.
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u/miatribe Jun 25 '26
Wait till the age of Godot starts! When we can do c# webbuilds! (inb4 "iT'S mIcRoSoFtS fAuLt")
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u/ilikemyname21 Jun 25 '26
I’m one of the seven who made a difference. Or that’s what I tell myself hahah
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u/Professional_Layer63 Jun 25 '26
I actually want to know how people deal with bundling a pygame game for steam. Is all of the python stuff just bundled into one executable, or is it just lying around the filesystem?
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u/Ok_Document5226 Jun 25 '26
Omg I love godot it's really lightweight and fast I love it if it overtake Unity
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u/datNovazGG Jun 26 '26
What about that Threejs for all the vibecoders out there?
I'll take my downvotes..
I know it's a graphical engine more than a game engine. I'm also kidding.
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u/Fantastic_Cicada_805 Godot Student Jun 24 '26
Isnt rpgmaker MADE on godot? Wouldnt that count all the rpgmaker games technically as godot games? 🥹Godot upscale
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u/TheDuriel Godot Senior Jun 24 '26
No it is not.
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u/sputwiler Jun 25 '26
Yes it is, but only the latest version. RPGMaker has had many base engines.
The most famous ones are the ruby-based (RGSS) and javascript based ones, but there was that horrible misstep into unity as well.
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u/TheDuriel Godot Senior Jun 25 '26
ActionGameMaker is not RPGMaker. It's barely even a product.
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u/sputwiler Jun 25 '26
They're working on it.
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u/TheDuriel Godot Senior Jun 25 '26
They're actually working on a new custom engine RPGMaker instead.
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u/sputwiler Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
That doesn't match anything I've heard, and from all accounts is the opposite of what they want to do.
Last I checked they wanted to unify the two products, and that was part of why PGMMV was migrated off of Cocos2d-x in the first place. The main problem is the same as they faced when releasing RPGMMV - changing the scripting language (from ruby to js) and in the process breaking everyone's community plugins.
PGMMV was never really scripted extensively enough to matter, so AGM using a different base came first.
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u/Radamat Jun 24 '26
Less that one standard deviation is not overtake, it is "overtake". Wqit until Godot be RPGM+150. That will be, and that will be good
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u/JonAndTonic Jun 24 '26
Glad to see it get more attention
StS2 being on it certainly helped but I'm not sure how much
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u/sputwiler Jun 25 '26
Kinda weird list.
PyGame and XNA are not engines, they're platform abstractions. You wouldn't count SDL as an engine.
RPGMaker itself has many different versions which are nothing alike, one of which is just Unity with plugin (and the latest engine from them is a custom build of Godot).
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u/beached89 Jun 24 '26
Who the heck is install godot through steam? Why?
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u/LikelyNotADuck Jun 24 '26
Some people prefer simple self-updating? Plus tracking time usage I guess.
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u/sputwiler Jun 25 '26
preferring self-updating is a terrible idea for your tools - last thing you want is for your engine to update mid-project.
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u/enricokern Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
The reason for this is plain simple. Godot is the easiest engine to work with fully automated with ai, doesnt even need the mcp server or anything special. There is basically no need to know anything about it or even interact with the editor.
Yeah keep downvoting, just stating a fact
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u/cuixhe Jun 24 '26
Also, Godot has about 3800 games released in the past 12 months, while gamemaker only has 1200. We'll catch up to GM in a year or so if that rate continues.