The Global Game Jam 2024 just concluded and it can give us an interesting insight into game engine popularity in 2024. Now do keep in mind, the criteria for choosing a game engine for quickly completed game jam projects is vastly different than for creating a full feature complete game. None the less, it does give us insight into the tools developers are defaulting to (or learning) in 2024.
Thanks to some charts and data created by Godot Engine project manager Rémi Verschelde, we have not only good insight into what game engines were used in 2024 for the Global Game Jam, but also how that changed from 2023.
Now the data to determine 2023 and 2024 data values:
It is interesting to see that massive amount of growth in over all submissions from year to year. The Godot game engine has overtaken Unreal Engine as the second most popular choice among game engines, while Unity perhaps due to the entire run-time fiasco has taken a fairly massive drop, falling from an impressive 61% to 36% year over year. That said, Unity is still the most popular game engine by a very wide margin. It will be interesting to see what trends happen in GGJ 2025.
Key Links
You can learn more about the Global Game Jam numbers and over all game jam game engine selection popularity in the video below.