LogInUnity still dominates as the most widely used engine, while Unreal Engine-powered games have accounted for a significantly larger share of units sold.
VG Insights, a games industry data and analysis firm, has published an insightful report on the state of video game engines in 2024, highlighting how the use cases of different engines have evolved over the years and revealing which software is currently trending and which is rapidly declining in popularity.
Having analyzed over 13,000 games with 1,000 or more sales released on Steam last year, VGI has found that despite recent turmoil and layoffs plaguing Unity over the past couple of years, it remains the most popular and widely used game engine, with 51% of shipped games being Unity-powered.
The second most used engine is Unreal Engine at 28%, followed by Godot with 5%, GameMaker with 4%, and Ren'Py with 2%. The remaining 10% consists of various other engines, including proprietary software such as Bethesda's Creation Engine, EA's Frostbite, and Rockstar's RAGE, meaning custom-made engines accounted for less than one-tenth of all games released on Steam in 2024.
In terms of actual sales, however, the landscape looks quite different. Games running on proprietary engines continue to dominate, accounting for around 42% of total units sold. Meanwhile, Unity has dropped from the second to the third place, holding a 26% share – down 1% from its 2023 result.
The real star of the show here is Unreal Engine, which jumped from 19% last year to 31% of units sold, with the growth attributed to some of the biggest 2024 games, such as Palworld and Black Myth: Wukong, being powered by UE5. As projected by VGI, big studios will continue replacing custom engines with Unreal, while Godot and GameMaker will attract more indie developers. Unity, the firm estimates, will likely maintain its 26-28% position by capturing market share from custom game engines.
Additionally, VGI has discovered that the choice of the engine varies widely depending on the game's genre, with Unreal Engine being favored for soulslikes, action-RPGs, and FPS games, Unity preferred for roguelikes and turn-based strategies, and JRPGs being mostly powered by proprietary software.
It's also worth noting that VGI's findings – showing a 10% drop in the share of proprietary engine-based game sales over the past year – seem to correlate with Steam's own statistics released in December, which point out that gamers spent only 15% of their total playtime on brand-new games released last year. Given that most custom-built engines are owned by AAA studios, and considering the AAA gaming industry's lackluster performance in 2024, the connection becomes clear, suggesting that unless major studios rethink their approach to game development, VGI's projection of proprietary software holding a 27% market share in 2030 could be overly optimistic.
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