Unreal Engine dominates as the most successful game engine, data reveals

We already know from the amount of people using it that Unreal Engine has become a huge force in game development, but new statistics show just how significant its presence has become. While Unity is still the most widely used engine, Unreal Engine-powered games accounted for a larger share of sales in 2024.

Meanwhile, the figures from Steam show that less than 10% of the games released on the platform in 2024 were made in developer's proprierary engines – more evidence for the growing transition to Epic Games' Unreal (see our pick of the best game development software).

The new report from the games industry market researcher Video Game Insights (VGI) shows the evolving use of different game engines based on an analysis of more than 13,000 games that sold at least 1,000 on Steam last year. Unsurprisingly, the findings show that Unity remains the most widely used game engine despite the recent upheaval at the company. It was used for 51% of the games analysed.

Unreal Engine was the second most widely used game engine, accounting for 28% of games. That's a long way ahead of Godot Engine (5%), GameMaker (4%) and Ren'Py (2%). All other engines together accounted for only 10%, which includes proprietary engines like Bethesda's Creation Engine, Rockstar's RAGE and EA's Frostbite.

But when we turn to sales, Unreal Engine games represented 31% of units sold compared to 26% for Unity. That makes Unreal the biggest single game engine for sales. Proprietary engines combined for 42% of sales, falling before 50% for the first time. This makes sense since proprietary engines tend to belong to AAA developers. Interestingly, Steam data for 2024 showed that only 15% of play time was spent on new titles.

Looking more closely at Unreal Engine, the growth in its use has been meteoric. The jump in sales from 19% in 2023 to 31% in 2024 will have been aided by big releases like Black Myth: Wukong and Palworld as well as surprise indie hits.

VGI notes that more big studios are moving to Unreal, as demonstrated by Konami's MGS Snake Eater remake. It predicts that Epic's engine will account for 40% of annual sales by 2030 while Godot and GameMaker will continue to attract indie developers. However, it thinks Unity will maintain its level of sales by catching market from custom engines too.

The report also highlights differences in game genre. Unreal Engine is more popular for action RPGs, soulslikes and FPS games, while Unity is used more for roguelikes and turn-based strategies and custom engines are used more for JRPGs.

You can see the full report at VGI. If you're looking for new hardware to run a game engine on, see our guide to the best laptops for game development. You can also see some of today's best deals below.