It’s easy to be drawn in by the drama of a revolution – a monumental game or technology that transforms an entire genre or industry segment, or even invents an entirely new one from whole cloth. The hype around those moments and the permanent anticipation for the Next Big Thing can, however, blind us to a different but equally important kind of change – the sort that happens incrementally, quietly, without the excitement of a major product launch or the fanfare of a shiny new technology.
This is the kind of change that only looks like a revolution in retrospect. It’s not that nobody notices it happening, it’s just that it’s a gradual process of going from sideshow to main event. You wake up one morning and realise that the interesting curiosity of a few years ago is now a major pillar not just of the industry, but of the creative medium as a whole.
The expansion of the indie game market over the past decade has been largely of this variety. Week by week, genre by genre, it has accumulated territory, turning spaces that were abandoned as unprofitable by major publishers into thriving markets, or even expanding into entirely new genres and demographics. It’s only in the past couple of years that the scale of what has been built has really become apparent. Only now, in hindsight, does the transition from a highly creative underground scene into a major commercial segment feel like it was inevitable and inexorable.
This week, the open source game engine Godot – which, although used by some major AAA projects, is primarily a tool beloved of indie creators – published a fascinating blog documenting the growth of its uptake. It’s not a perfect proxy for the indie market as a whole, of course, but it’s still a valuable set of data points that allow us to peer below the surface at the underlying infrastructure.
According to the engine’s lead rendering maintainer, Clay John, the number of Godot games released on Steam is roughly doubling year on year, with SteamDB tracking 618 titles in 2023–24, climbing to 1,500 the following year, and reaching nearly 2,900 in 2025–26. Google search interest has grown at around 45% annually. Perhaps most promising of all for the engine’s future is the note that Godot’s adoption by budding developers at game jam events has been growing so consistently that its creators think they could hit 50% of all jam entries in the not too distant future.
It’s worth noting some really important context here. Godot’s surge isn’t just driven by the organic growth of indie games – it was turbocharged by Unity’s catastrophic own goal in 2023, when the company attempted to impose retroactive runtime fees on developers using its engine. That provoked a furious backlash and pushed indie developers to move over from Unity to Godot. Perhaps the loudest and most high-profile of those moves was by Mega Crit, creators of the enormously successful Slay the Spire, who opted to rebuild its sequel entirely in Godot, despite work already being underway in Unity. When Slay the Spire 2 launched a couple of months ago, it became the 20th biggest launch in Steam history by concurrent players – a pretty comprehensive answer to long-standing doubts about Godot’s suitability for major, commercially successful titles.
Reducing the story to a rivalry between engine creators is misleading, though, because the reality is that while Unity mis-stepped in 2023 and blotted its copybook with some indie creators, it has also recovered quite a bit in the intervening years. That means that Godot is not just replacing Unity to some degree in market segments that Unity traditionally dominated. Unity is doing fine; Godot is doing its own thing, building its reputation as the engine of a creative ecosystem that exists largely orthogonal to how traditional publishers think about the games market. It thrives in 2D games, in roguelikes and auto-battlers, in cosy management sims and horror walking simulators and a hundred other micro-genres that AAA development has either never touched or long since abandoned as insufficiently scalable.
Godot and Unity, along with other free software like Blender, are the tooling layers for a vast chimera of a market. Assembled from the castoff segments that trend-chasing blockbuster development left behind, along with whole new niches that major publishers never even tried to address, it has quietly grown to the point where by 2024, indie games accounted for nearly half of full-game revenue on Steam. Console sales, in-app purchases, and mobile games undoubtedly tip the scales massively towards major publishers overall, but half of the game sales revenue from the dominant PC distribution platform is no small thing.
“Whole genres that the mainstream left for dead have been occupied and revitalised by indie creators”
While some parts of the industry have embraced the indie boom by seeking to partner with successful indie studios (with admittedly mixed results), other companies have been slow to reckon with the change. When a game from an unknown developer appears in the Steam charts next to a major publisher’s release, that publisher’s response tends to be puzzlement; who is this, and how did they get here? The answer, generally, is that they got there by building a whole alternative gaming ecosystem while the traditional industry was looking elsewhere. Whole genres that the mainstream left for dead – the isometric RPG, the city builder, the tactical wargame, the metroidvania – have been occupied and revitalised by indie creators who then effectively used new media channels like game streaming to reach passionate, under-served audiences.
In music and film, incumbent industries eventually found ways to absorb their indie counterparts, even if it took a generation of disruption to get there. The conveyor belt from Sundance darling to Marvel tentpole director was, for about a decade, one of the defining routes into mainstream filmmaking – a pipeline through which indie credibility was exchanged for blockbuster budgets. There isn’t really any equivalent to that in games. The walls between indie success and mainstream development remain unusually high. The occasional exception – like Dead Cells developer Evil Empire being handed the keys to the Castlevania franchise – only serves to underscore how rare such crossovers are.
In part, that’s down to a strong but somewhat vaguely defined sense on the publisher and large studio side that the skillset and mindset for making indie hits is somehow materially different from what’s needed to guide a AAA tanker safely home. Equally, though, there are many indie developers who show little or no interest in crossing the wall in that direction to begin with. Some of them are in indie to begin with because they want to avoid publisher interference in their work – independence as a state of mind, not just a condition of business.
The shift from indie hit to mainstream studio carries a ton of non-financial costs, after all. Longer development cycles, larger teams, corporate oversight, the grinding pressure to produce commercial certainty rather than creative risk… When a platform like Steam and a chaotic but often tremendously successful promotion ecosystem like streamers and influencers can deliver huge commercial hits to indie studios, the lure of a publisher’s cheque is significantly diminished.
Studios like Innersloth, which made Among Us in a matter of months and watched it become a global phenomenon, or Landfall, which has built a devoted following by shipping a succession of joyfully strange games on its own terms, are not obviously clamouring for seats at the traditional publishers’ table. They are small, agile teams that reach millions of players and generate genuine commercial success on a timeline that large studios can barely manage for a single DLC pack; they have no incentive to trade that for a five-year development cycle and a committee of executives dragging your milestone builds over the coals.
This might be the sharpest distinction between games and other industries like film and TV. Independent production is still possible in movies, but the scale of production required to compete at the top level has created an almost gravitational pull towards the mainstream. The economics of indie film have arguably been improved somewhat by the possibility of being picked up by a major streaming service, but they remain precarious enough that the lure of a studio budget is genuinely transformative for many directors.
In games, the economics are more forgiving. Game development might have become incredibly expensive at the top end of AAA, but at the entry level, the tools are cheaper, the distribution infrastructure is accessible, and fundamental infrastructure like Godot is free. While big publishers struggle with budgets upwards of $100 million for major titles, for indie creators, the barrier to reaching a mass audience has never been lower, which means the incentive to accept the constraints of mainstream development has never been weaker.
This is not a threat to the traditional games business, but it is a challenge. AAA publishing remains a colossal business, and the spectacles it produces command audiences that no indie title has matched. But the data coming out of Godot is a useful reminder that the map of the games industry has been redrawn while much of the attention was focused elsewhere. The territory that once sat empty between the AA game and the hobbyist project has been settled, developed, and is now a thriving space that commands significant audiences – and revenues – of its own. It has its own infrastructure, its own stars, its own economy; and it built it all without asking permission.
