Unity dominates Steam’s top 50 best games list as most popular engine

Some devs might wonder what the most popular game engines are that are used in Steam’s best games? Here are some interesting stats that will answer the question.

On July 26, Redditor wx3labs compiled a list of game engines used in the highest-rated titles on Steam of 2020.

It is based on the top 150 best Steam games released in 2020, according to gamer reviews. It assigns scores to games based on the number of votes and percentage of positive reviews. So it is not the list of most popular titles, as some hits might still have mixed reviews.

wx3labs picked up the first 50 games from this list, excluding free-to-play titles. The user also left Hades and Notia behind because these games were presented there in 2019 due to their EA launches.

Here are the most popular engines by the number of games built on them:

• Unity — 23
• KiriKiri — 5
• Unreal — 3
• GameMaker Studio — 2
• Source/Source 2 — 2
• RPG Maker — 1
• Custom/other — 14

So Unity’s dominance shouldn’t be called into question here. The engine is used both in small indie games and some world-famous titles. The list includes Ori and the Will of the Wisps, Desperados III, Phasmophobia, Spiritfarer, Outer Wilds, and Townscaper.

Last year, wx3labs made the same compilation for the best games of 2019. Unity was still the leader, followed by Unreal and GameMaker Studio.