What is the Custom Engine-based ratio in the top 100 grossing mobile games for the USA?
I did research and am glad to share interesting facts with you. That is the final article about my investigation of game engines used for mobile game development of the top 100.
Here is a small stats recap for the most popular game engines:
- 66% of Unity-based games and Unity versions distribution
- 13% of Cocos games
- 1% of Unreal Engine games with the top bestseller PUBG
- 1% of Defold games
- 0% of Godot games
As a result, I discovered that 19% of games were built with a custom game engine.
Let's see the list of the 19 mobile games from the top 100 (top ranks are relevant on 24 November 2023):
- #3 Candy Crush Saga by King released in 2012
- #5 Roblox by Roblox Corporation released in 2012
- #8 Bingo Blitz-Bingo Games by Playtika released in 2012
- #10 Township by Playrix released in 2012
- #12 Gardenscapes by Playrix released in 2016
- #13 Candy Crush Soda Saga by King released in 2014
- #15 Fishdom by Playrix released in 2015
- #18 Homescapes by Playrix was released in 2017
- #21 Slotomania™ Slots Casino Games by Playtika released in 2011
- #28 DoubleDown Casino by DoubleDown Int released in 2012
- #31 POP! Slots™ Vegas Casino Games released in 2016
- #37 Clash of Clans by Supercell released in 2012
- #45 Huuuge Casino Slots Vegas 777 by Huuge released in 2015
- #47 Golf Clash by Electronic Arts released in 2017
- #51 Summoners War by Com2us released in 2014
- #62 Clash Royale by Supercell released in 2016
- #71 Klondike Adventures by Vizor released in 2018
- #73 House of Fun™ — Casino Slots by Playtika released in 2013
- #83 Wizard of Oz Slots Games by Zynga released in 2014
And the clear facts to me:
No fresh games built with custom engines in the top from 2019
Old popular games have been living for 10 years and more
It is hard to move these mastodonts now. Some companies like Playrix, Playtika, and King know how special ingredients have been at their peak for years.
Does it make sense to use a custom engine now to develop new games and take the first place? Not, even if the Unity runtime fee or other similar changes from Epics will be applied. Or your costs will be enormous.
The complexity of taking the top ranks nowadays is extra high and continues to increase. From the last Unite 2023, I got insights about industry trends of increasing the share of non-organic installs in total DAU and increasing CPI yearly.
Developing a new game from scratch and being the first is hard. Monopoly Go did it, but the game was developed on Unity. Supporting and improving the existing one at the top is much easier.
I was curious and, deep inside, wanted to analyze all of these games. I discovered that most of these games are built with a native C++ custom engine and use Lua scripting or C++ for feature development, some of them use cross-platform stack based on Xamarin, or the game application is just a native wrapper and loading JS content at runtime.
What I did not like was that I found inside some debug artifacts, not obfuscated Lua code, tons of JSON configs or raw shaders, and other stuff not related to production. For me, that is a bad sign of the quality of a custom engine.
Some interesting publications about the development of Candy Crush Soda Saga and Summoners War.
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