Tierlisting the BEST (and worst) GAME ENGINES

UPDATE to the UPDATE: Unity has backpedalled really hard, and actually made things better in certain cases. Yet they have still shattered a lot of trust in the Engine. I think at this point it's definitely a B instead of an A. Why Unity isn't pure evil anymore (but not amazing either): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1F_vc2W_kc UPDATE (outdated): So, Unity has been doing some weird moves lately, and I cannot in good faith standby the decision anymore to give it an A, it has shifted more to a B or even C with latest events. If you want console support, go for Unreal, if you want something a little easier, aimed at PC/Mobile, Godot is the way to go. Why no more Unity? https://youtu.be/4AvPhoU9rGA

"Unity for life" ... Ooof. That one didn't age too well.

I remember using Game Maker in high school. I had no idea it was used to make Hotline Miami.

my first game engine was powerpoint 😅 made some point and click adventures during class.

This is pointless. You guys have only ever used Unity in a serious capacity. So how can you rate engines you've never used? I use Construct 3 and have never programmed it in javascript. The visual event system is sufficient. I have 2 games published on steam with Construct 3, so it can do desktop as well.

The information on GameMaker is honestly pretty misinformed. At the time this video was made: -GameMaker was already free for educational purposes. -"If you get started you outgrow it in a month, it's very niche". What are you basing this on? It's one of the most general purpose 2d engines out there, it can do pretty much anything in 2d. And "You can make anything with it, it's just not gonna be great". This is just bullshit, GameMaker is limited to your skills as a developer. Not unlike any other engine. - "You can force it for 3D stuff with their pre-made assets and things like that." What on earth do assets have to do with an engine. People literally made custom doom/quake map loaders in GameMaker. You just need to do 3d yourself since it's a 2d engine. Don't get me wrong, it's great that you guys are making comparisons, but this entire section is pretty misinformed. It is just really disappointing that almost all comparison videos on game engines are really shallow, generally misinformed and won't help people make an informed decision at all. Apart from that, GameMaker's license structure has been updated at 21/11/2023, GameMaker is now: -Free for non-commercial use. -One-time fee for commercial use. -Subscription model only for enterprise + console exports.

Interesting to include board games, I think nowadays a lot of people forget about them and it actually could give you a lot of new perspectives you can utilize in the game making process. Good watch guys! :))

You guys are sleeping on game maker. Has much more market share than Godot. Also has a ton of million dollar games published in it.

GDevelop 5 is a good option for beginners. It's a no-code game engine, basically a free alternative to Construct. Pretty good for fast prototyping as well.

GD Script is not based on Go, but Python I believe

The only point I disagree with heavily is GameMaker. As someone that has published games on Unity, GMS, and even GameSalad when I was starting out. When it comes to 2D games Gamemaker is the king of 2D. It has come a long way, is extremely powerful, and very flexible if you learn their GML language. Which is you know Python you pretty much know GML. I primarily use Unity because you can learn one engine and create anything from simple 2D up to complex 3D games, but if I was a 2D dev, I would stick with GameMaker. Everything you need is all provided and simple to use. You can create your sprites etc in engine when creating your objects if you want. You can do pretty much anything you want as long as its 2D. The only thing UE and Unity have over it is the ability to work up to 3D. A big thing for me when working with an engine is the ability to understand it and its organization. Gamemaker along with Unity are both very similar in organization and its a lot easier to understand how things work. Unreal always feels far more complicated for even the simplest task. As for GM visual editor, its far more complex than he is saying here. Maybe he is confusing GameMaker with GameSalad or a very old version of GM... idk. GMS2 change GM a lot and it has a lot of experienced 2D studios using it and very successfully. Another Engine not mentioned here that is big behind the scenes with corporations etc and great for mobile games is GDevelope. It is starting to gain a lot of traction and looks to be a great starting point for people that aren't great with programming.

I believe with Gamemaker Studio, you don't have to pay indefinitely. You just have to pay once to export the game into a Desktop format, then you can safely unsubscribe from the software.

There is also Unigine, O3DE, and Several frameworks that would allow to make a custom engine "easier" like Ogre and Raylib.

I moved from Unity and Unreal to GameMaker because I liked the simplicity. You can do quite a lot with it as long as you understand the limitations. It's fun to use, which was the most important thing for me. I write code in it, not the drag and drop system.

the original version of Vampire Survivors was made with Phaser :)

Creating my own engine (or in my case, being part of a group to create one), just for the experience really really helped me. Like you already said, it teaches you about the logical foundation of an engine and tremendously boosts your knowledge about commonly used systems in popular engines. Just by having many years of programming experience and the knowledge from building an engine, I learned to build a reasonably solid game within 2 weeks (1 week learning through experimentation, 1 week gamejam) with unity. If you do have the intention of learning everything there is to it and you wanna feel good about knowing whats actually going on behind the scenes, building an engine really boosts your progress even if it takes more time to actually get into making games. And keep it simple, I recommend just doing 2D instead 3D, because the problems you gonna solve are similar, but 3D is like a cubic factor more work to do, even if its 'just' one extra dimension. Learn about concepts, not any universally applicable world-fomula! Thanks for the video and actually mentioning the "create your own engine"-part, I have rarely seen this done right :)

Did you guys do an ounce of research? Vampire Survivors, game of the year, 10s of millions of dollars in the solo devs pocket, was made in Phaser.

Great video. A couple of my games are made with Phaser due to wanting to make web-based games like a virtual world, but I think its more properly labeled as a framework and not an engine. You can also use existing tools like Electron or the new Rust-based Tauri to wrap your game as its own desktop application, and distribute it that way. I believe that is what the dev(s) of Vampire Survivors did (however they re-created it in Unity for their Nintendo Switch version). That route is probably not recommended for someone just getting into game development, though. For them, I would really recommend Godot due to the recent pricing changes with Unity and more recently Epic's changes. Even though these pricing changes don't affect indie devs I think the openness of Godot really protects you from anything that may happen in the future- and Godot is perfectly capable of accomplishing anything a beginner could possibly want.

Great video! Would love to see you do a follow up to this one, as there are a ton other engines out there. Got some comments on a couple of the entries here, based solely on my personal experiences: Unity: I started using Unity a year ago, and finished the small project that I had set out to make. I definitely suffered from the "multiple pipelines" problem, as not only did I not know what that meant in the first place, and then when I learned what it meant it was practically too late to change. But also stuff like how some assets in the Unity store are made for one pipeline, and some made for another, also became a problem. On top of that, the entire thing felt very feature bloated. So much stuff that I just had no need for, and I felt that I had to learn a lot of stuff just so I would know how to turn it off or avoid it, instead of actually learning how to use the engine to create the game I wanted. On the other hand, I did manage to create the game I wanted with it, from start to finish. But I also think I could've done it better in another engine. Personally, I actually think one of the best points about this engine is that it so very easily can export to practically any platform. RPG Maker: I got very far into a small project in this engine(specifically the MV version), and it's really good at doing the extremely specific thing it's made for. But as soon as you step even an inch outside of that, it's immediately terrible! My project required basically having a new screen with some simple animation appear(basically an automated pseudo battle screen), which would be incredibly easy to program in any generic engine, but it was near impossible in RPG Maker, even after finding and adding 3rd party extensions. Games like To The Moon, Omori, and Yume Nikki are made with it, but I think at least To The Moon would've probably been easier for the developers to make in something like Game Maker instead. It does one thing well, but I think a lot of developers using this engine to make anything outside of that probably did it because RPG Maker itself has been their hobby half their life. That's not a dig at those people, I really applaud that! I just think RPG Maker could almost be considered more of a specific hobby than a choice for a game engine. RPG Maker is to game engines what a plastic bead art plate is to a canvas: They're both used for creating art on. But while on a canvas you can draw and paint with a multitude of tools and mediums, using thousands of different techniques and styles, but the bead art plate can really only be used to place plastic beads in preset positions, you have a very limited amount of colours to choose from, and there's just a single technique. You can make some really nice things using bead art, but it's still going to be nothing but bead art. Game Maker: I've barely touched this one, but it seems interesting. I think they've just changed their licensing options, so you can just pay for a one time $99 license. And the free version can now export to desktop. Own Engine: When I first got into game development as a hobby, about 25 years ago, there really wasn't a ton of options for free(or low cost) game engines out there. So making your own engine was kinda the standard. And it's honestly not too difficult, depending on what kind of game you're going to make. Of course, if you want to make a AAA quality FPS, making a custom game engine is absolutely silly. But if you're making a 2D platformer or adventure game, or even a simple 3D game, it's actually not that hard. I made an engine where I could walk around in a 3D world with first person view when I was around 15 years old. I also made a simple 2D platformer engine for Android about ten years ago. I also started a 2D, top down, isometric action RPG/adventure engine. And I'm kind of a shit programmer. :P Building your own engine isn't only a great learning experience, but it also makes sure the engine is optimized for the game you're actually making. Most of making an engine is just making it show the stuff you want and taking input, while the rest is practically gameplay stuff, which you need to program anyway in any other engine(either through code or drag & drop). Because you never need to make an engine the likes of Unreal, Unity, or Godot, as those engines are created for developing a ton of games. So you'll only be coding one percent of the amount of features they have, and likely also much easier versions of the features, because you don't need all the options either. You can also make your own level editors, or even keep it very simple. For my 2D platformer engine, I actually used Notepad as my level editor, and the game would just read the lines of text in the file. The different characters and symbols would mean different types of tile sprites(like "g" would be regular ground, "w" would be water, and "." would be empty space), as well as some other info on the first line saying which sprite theme was to be used, and such. While the action RPG game just used big pictures for the levels, and would read collision from a black and white image. Other Engines: - In my late teens/early twenties I spent a ton of time in Dark Basic and Dark Basic Professional by The Game Creators, neither of which were great, but it was possible to make games in them. These were extremely code centric engines built on DirectX, but I think those are now deprecated, and they've made "GameGuru Max" and "AppGameKit", which I've no experience with. - My current project is using a small engine called Leadwerks(which is about to be replaced by the Ultra Engine), which I chose because it features an editor similar to Half-Life's Hammer/Worldcraft editor, and it's feature light. While it's not being advertised as such, it seems like an extremely good engine for lowpoly graphics games. And it uses the same kind of "attach script file to 3D object" type logic that Unity(and UE?) uses. It does have some minor annoyances, but way less than my annoyances with f.ex. Unity. And documentation could be a bit better. ;) Still early on in using this one, but I'm liking it a lot thus far. - Another engine I've played with a bit is Adventure Game Studio. It's similar to RPG Maker in the way that it's a very niche engine for making a certain type of old school game(and that it's been around forever), this one being for 2D point & click or text input adventure games. (Think old Sierra and LucasArts games, like King's Quest or Day of the Tentacle.) It's great at what it does, but unlike RPG Maker I think you're less likely to actually try and make any other type of game than what it's made for. - I also wanted to find a simple game engine for my son to play around in, and GameSalad looked okay. My bad for not actually learning it myself before letting him start playing around in it, because it wasn't exactly great. :P Anyway, please make a follow up video to this one! Would love to see it! :D

Construct 3 should be way higher. Construct 3 is so good and simple for beginners. You can literally make a functioning platformer in a few clicks. Only issues I have found is the small community (making it hard to troubleshoot some things) and the monthly pay model. However, for it's easy functionality for people who don't know how to code, it kind of makes it worth it. At least until you learn how to code efficiently.