In Unity you can only remove the start up image if you pay enough. So many small indie titles with little budgets have the start up logo while the bigger productions normally removed them. Before Unity fucked up only a small portion of indies used Unreal so you have to look harder to find that many junk games. I think we will see in the next years a rise on Unreal engine junk games
Yeaaah, but then again not really, there has been an Unreal scene in indies. I’d say it was a 60-30-10 split between Unity, Unreal and Godot (of people using these engines, not counting custom ones). My point is there is a “character” or “personality” of these engines. It stems from both the factors you mentioned, and the tutorials / sample projects that are in Unreal or Unity. Unreal games quite often have specific lighting that immediately makes you go “Unreal” from looking at a game. I can’t really explain it, it’s like seeing AI photos - sometimes all the fingers, eyes are there but the “uncanny valley” feeling remains. For Unity it always was the “jank” to me, even without seeing any logo and googling afterwards. Probably just confirmation bias on my part, but oh well
Edit: for Unreal another tell is the default “skeleton” animations for a third person character. Some of the cheap asset flips even leave the unreal robot / doll model. It mostly stems from the UE marketplace and people rigging their models with the default skeleton so more anims / custom ones work for it
Before the Unity suicide, I doubt it had 10% either. And you know, making games takes time, so in terms of released games, we might still not see an uptick.
But I do think newly developed, particularly indie titles will go beyond those 10%, and maybe even quite easily so.
There’s not many statistics out there, so here’s some horribly biased ones: https://gamefromscratch.com/godot-popularity-at-gmtk-jam-2024-explodes/
This is from a gamejam held by a particular YouTube channel. That YouTube channel has an ongoing series about making a Unity game, nothing about Godot yet.
But it is a gamejam, where people sit down for just a weekend to make a game, so people will be much more willing to try a new engine out. Although they’ll typically have some prior experience, since you don’t want to spend the whole gamejam learning an engine.
But yeah, those caveats notwithstanding, that still is a significant growth for Godot.
Doublechecked it, and it’s 4% based on steamdb for 2023, and 5% for 2024 That’s of course counting only these three.
Steam released 14500 games in 2023 (all engines).
Unreal on steam was 2400
Unity was 7400
Godot 400
