A survey conducted by Perforce in conjunction with JetBrains has found that only 50 percent of game engine projects are for games. Other targets – such as film, television, marketing, training and 3D art – make up the rest.

Perforce is a vendor of development tools including the Helix Core version control system popular with game developers. It conducts an annual State of Game Technology survey – this year in collaboration with IDE specialist JetBrains for the first time. There were 576 respondents across 64 countries, of whom 40 percent were developers and others in roles including studio owners, visual artists, project managers and producers.

We took a look at the survey results from the previous three years to get an idea of some trends. It’s worth noting with this type of survey, where the questions vary from year to year and participants are recruited via different channels, one should be more than cautious in extrapolating the results. It is unlikely to be a coincidence that this year – with respondents “gathered through marketing channels affiliated with Perforce or JetBrains” – that JetBrains Rider usage has increased to 34 percent, from 25 percent last year, for example.

Note that percentages sum to more than 100 because of multiple tools used by the same developers or studios.

The big two in games engines are Unity and Epic’s Unreal. Unreal’s share has gradually increased, according to the reports, from 45 percent in 2021 to 63 percent in the latest survey. Unity’s share supposedly dropped to 18 percent in 2023, from 50 percent in 2022, but in 2024 is back up to 47 percent. Fickle developers or unreliable surveys? We would suggest the latter. But there is a consistent pattern showing Unreal winning share – especially in the biggest studios. According to the report, in the media and entertainment industry “teams overwhelmingly prefer Unreal Engine (51 percent) compared to Unity (16 percent).”

The 2024 report is also where the open source Godot engine shows rapid growth, having been lost somewhere in “other” in previous surveys. Now it is used by 9 percent – even higher in some territories such as North America (11 percent) and Latin America (20 percent).

Unity’s appeal has likely been impacted by its move to runtime fees though these only apply to games with more than $1 million in revenue and a million installs. Unreal also charges royalties for projects with lifetime revenue exceeding $1 million.

The main scripting language for Unity is C# – accounting for the interest in JetBrains Rider. Godot may be attracting Unity refugees, given that the project has now added C# as a fully supported language. The Godot-native GDScript is still recommended, but C# has better performance.

Another advantage of Godot is its relatively small size. “Unreal or Unity can require over 40GB of storage to get started. In comparison, Godot’s native editor is only 8GB,” the survey report notes.

Also notable is increased use of VS Code. Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE is consistently the most popular overall, despite dropping from 72 percent in 2021 to 60 percent now – but VS Code has increased from 13 percent to 41 percent over that period. 

Adobe Photoshop is the most widely used graphics tool – currently with 62 percent usage. But we also noticed that the free and open source Blender is attracting growing share – now 59 percent up, from 54 percent in 2021.

The biggest challenges facing those developing with gaming technology are familiar: Funding, aggressive timelines, not enough team members, and collaboration issues.

The biggest collaboration issue may come as a surprise: Respondents complain that “moving large files is slow or difficult.” File sizes have got larger, thanks to higher resolutions and 3D technology, and according to the researchers, “collaboration and the tools involved have failed to keep up.”

The full report can be found here.