GMTK’s 2026 jam just ended this past weekend, with the voting period lasting for the next four days. Anybody here work on anything? Or know of someone that made something?
I haven’t had the time to work on a gamejam at all this year, but idk I might try and put something together for the upcoming brackeys jam in a few weeks, or one of the last few Ludum Dares before it disappears. Unfortunately LD is on its last legs, with the founder currently in-between jobs and no longer focusing on hosting it. The main site for the jams apparently been down the for last two months.
Anyways, this is really interesting. Of the 10,511 GMTK 2026 entries, the majority of them were submitted using Godot, 4910 entries (51%)! You can check the thread here if you want to see the full stats and even a comparison between the previous years, but i’ve compiled them into a chart down below so its a bit easier to see how the numbers shift.
What’s really interesting is tracking the growth here. Last year there were 9,724 entries in GMTK 2025, and at that point Godot held a 39% share of the entries, to Unity’s 41%. This year, there’s nearly 1000 new entries, and it looks like Godot is the engine of choice for those newcomers.
This isn’t just people jumping ship from Unity, or other engines for that matter, and landing on Godot. Godot is clearly making a name for itself as an entry point for thousands of new developers in the Game Jam scene. And that’s pretty inspiring, I think. As GMTK jam grows, the vast majority of new entries have been coming from Godot developers. Unity appears to have stagnated, mostly staying around the same level, rather than growing in size as GMTK becomes more and more popular as people’s jam of choice to participate in.
| GMTK 2022 | GMTK 2023 | GMTK 2024 | GMTK 2025 | GMTK 2026 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unity | 3716 (61%) | 4062 (59%) | 3324 (43%) | 3960 (41%) | 3602 (34%) |
| Godot | 958 (16%) | 1278 (19%) | 2838 (37%) | 3765 (39%) | 4910 (47%) |
| Gamemaker Studio | 377 (6%) | 363 (5%) | 389 (5%) | 487 (5%) | 498 (5%) |
| Unreal Engine | ? | ? | 383 (5%) | 439 (4%) | 319 (3%) |
| Other | 1027 (17%) | 1132 (17%) | 777 (10%) | 1073 (11%) | 1182 (11%) |
| Total Entries | 6078 | 6835 | 7711 | 9724 | 10511 |
These numbers are of course specifically about submissions that are successfully submitted to the jam. Whether they’ve audited each entry to ensure the game even compiles, or is even much of a game, those are separate questions. Something I’m personally interested in is what % of 3D games are made using Unreal Engine. I knew that 3D game entries were pretty rare to see in these jam settings, so maybe UE’s 5% usage reflects more on the % of 3D entries, rather than the % of UE usage.
Games that can run in a web browser are usually more favored, since they host the jam on Itch. This lends itself to 2D games of course, and also the file size requirements can play a huge role too in what gets used in a Game Jam versus in indie games as a whole.