A Reddit user found out which engines are most often used in the most highly rated games on Steam. It turned out that in the top 50 last year, almost 50% of projects were made on Unity. This engine is ahead of competitors, including Unreal, by a large margin.Such conclusions were reached by the user wx3labs, who shared the results of his small research on a popular site.
As a basis, he took the list of the 150 best Steam games for 2020 according to gamers. It is important to note that this is not a rating of the most popular projects, since the place in it is determined based on the number of user ratings and the percentage of positive reviews.
wx3labs selected the first 50 titles from the list, completely excluding fritupley projects. Hades and Notia were also not included in his rating, since they appeared in early access on Steam back in 2019.
The most popular engines by number of gamesUnity — 23
- KiriKiri — 5
- Unreal — 3
- GameMaker Studio — 2
- Source/Source 2 — 2
- RPG Maker — 1
- Custom/other — 14
- Unity became the undisputed leader in the list.
This engine is especially popular among small indie developers. However, sometimes it is also used in fairly well-known projects. Among the top 50 best Steam games of 2020, Unity has developed titles such as Ori and the Will of the Wisps, Desperados III, Phasmophobia, Spiritfarer, Outer Wilds and Townscaper.
Previously, wx3labs compiled a similar list for 2019 projects. Then the first place also went to Unity, followed by Unreal and GameMaker Studio.