The most popular engines for indie games

Rob Beschizza 6:00 am Tue Jul 17, 2018

A new page at Itch.io, the top platform for publishing and selling indie games, reveals the most popular game development engines and apps there.

Unity is way out in the lead, accounting for almost half the projects published at Itch. Construct, an app requiring no coding skills, and GameMaker, a general-purpose creative suite with powerful scripting tools and optional modules, together account for about a quarter of the projects.

Then come engines designed for specific genres: Twine, for interactive fiction, in fourth, and RPG Maker, for Japanese-style computer role playing games, in fifth. PICO-8, a "fantasy console" that imposes strict limitations on developers in imitation of a 1980s' 8-bit box, is in sixth. Bitsy and Puzzlescript, which produce simple tile-based games, are the seventh- and twelfth-most popular engines. Ren'Py, for making visual novels, is in ninth. Unreal Engine and the beloved free 2D engine Löve round out the top 10.

Of the rest, only the fast-growing Godot engine has more than 500 projects.

Note that software frameworks—HTML games—are excluded from the tally. Only Phaser, with 1,173 projects, would rank in the top 10, between Bitsy and Unreal Engine.

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