Playgama: New Web games Engines & Genres
Unity is the leader, yet there is a great diversity, specifically in 2D titles.
Playgama continues to explore the use of game engines in web games. Previously, the company released a report on the most popular engines, and now it has supplemented this data with genre information. In H1’25, more than half of the new releases were built on Unity.
Unity remains the market leader, but its share is less than 50% in 9 out of 17 categories. The engine dominates in Idle, Race, and casual genres. Where there’s less 3D, there’s a greater presence of Construct or Phaser.
Defold, GameMaker, and PlayCanvas remain niche engines. However, for example, PlayCanvas holds 12.4% in IO, 11.3% in Simulators, and 10.5% in the Animal category. Defold and GameMaker hold 14.9% and 7.5% in Merge games, respectively.
New games on Web Platforms
Casual games are the leaders among web releases. They account for about 20% of all new releases. If you also factor in puzzles (14.5%), the figure reaches 34.5%.
Action games are in third place by popularity (10%), idle games in fourth (6%), and adventure games in fifth (5%).
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According to Playgama founder Dmitry Kachmar, the choice of engine is directly related to genre. Unity remains the leader for 3D and complex projects, but in classic and casual genres, developers are increasingly choosing lighter and faster solutions. The ecosystem is diversifying, which indicates the maturity of web gaming.
Overall, Playgama expects web games to become more complex in terms of content quality and monetization. New technologies (like WebGPU) and the growing competitive environment should help with this.
Fascinating! I was expecting to see Godot engine somewhere on these charts. Any idea why not?