Godot

Godot is the indie game dev power move. MIT-licensed, 120MB editor, zero runtime fees, zero revenue sharing, zero forced splash screens. After Unity's pricing debacle, developers flooded to Godot — and the engine earned it. For 2D games, it's arguably the best engine available, period.

Unity still wins for 3D and console targets with its massive asset store and mature ecosystem. Unreal dominates AAA visuals. But if you're making a platformer, roguelike, RPG, or visual novel, Godot's 2D pipeline is faster to work with and GDScript's Python-like syntax has far less boilerplate than C#.

Use Godot if you're a solo dev or small team building 2D or lightweight 3D games. The MIT license means nobody can pull a Unity on you — ever.

The catch: 3D is improving but still trails Unity and Unreal significantly. The plugin ecosystem is smaller. And finding Godot-experienced contractors is harder than finding Unity devs. For console publishing, you'll need third-party tools since Godot doesn't ship proprietary console SDKs directly.