3 min read

Godot Q1 2021

The Q1 report for 2021. Is Godot going in the right direction, numbers-wise? Here's a bunch of data to show that, yes, it is.
Godot Q1 2021
Photo by Adeolu Eletu / Unsplash

Jebus this took a while to get out. And even with the extra time I still couldn't get all the data I wanted. 🤦‍♂️

This is just a mini status report for the first time in 2021, so I'm not gonna put a lot of extra stuff. Mostly just data.

The games

So far this year, there has been at least one Godot game published every single day. The peaks, unsurprisingly, match the Godot Wild Jam and the Gotm.io Jam deadlines, for the most part.

I'm not entirely sure why March is so different tho. I don't think I can draw any definitive conclusion without extra data, so I'll just leave it at that for now. I have all year to figure it out.

What I can say for sure is that Jams are awesome for pumping Godot numbers up on itch and that they keep the games coming at regular intervals.

At the current pace (~754 games in 3 months) 2021 is going to beat 2020 in the total number of games by a decent margin: Give it or take 500 extra games, or a ~22% year-over-year increase.

Of course, it could just be that more people are using the "Made With" label. But who wants to think like that?

Tags and Software

Pretty much the same trends and tools used in previous years. Aseprite and 2D are still undisputed kings.

Other numbers:

  • ~60,5% are "Released", ~17,5% are "In Development", ~18,9% are "Prototypes" and 10 projects are "On Hold"
  • ~58% of the games are playable on the browser, ~33% on macOS, ~63% on Windows, and ~41% on Linux
  • ~28% of the games are Platformers and ~22% are Puzzle games. Action and Adventures take ~24% and  ~17% respectively
  • ~33% of the games were released in January, ~33% in February and ~34% in March
  • More than 30% of all games were published on Sunday

Videos:

  • 73 videos about Godot were published on Youtube since January 1st. A mix of Tutorials (mostly), devblogs, live streams and presentations (Like the Godot Con)
  • The videos add to ~1938,85 minutes of content or a little over 32 hours.

Reddit:

  • The subreddit has gained 5668 new subscribers since the beginning of the year.
  • According to subredditstats, the post per day amount to around 48 (non-average) and ~250 comments (again, non-average. A 24-hour sample)
  • The sub ranks 6112 on the site

Jams:

  • GOTM.io Jam #1, #2, and #3 had 49 entries and 752 ratings so far this year in total
  • Godot Wild Jam #29, #30, and #31 had 213 entries and 3348 ratings (Most of them on the last two. I don't know what happened)

And that's it.

This is not supposed to be an end-all be-all report, but a sample to see if Godot is growing and by how much. That's why I'm using Itch and Youtube as the main pointers.  

I REALLY wanted the Twitter data. Specifically how much the #godotengine hashtag had been used between January and March. But god dammit Twitter is a pain in the ass when it comes to Data. I'm going to have to make a custom scraper just for that.

Also, while writing this, I realized I didn't add the official info (number of blog posts, pull requests, issues, etc). I'll probably end up putting that on their own issue. It would be interesting to see the speed of development.

📰 Godot news round-up

First, a reminder for a couple of upcoming Jams:


  • Important:

Release candidate: Godot 3.3 RC 8

According to Remi Verschelde (Godot Project Manager and maintainer):

"This might be your last chance to test a RC and ensure that 3.3-stable won't cause issues in your games :)" - Remi
We're pretty confident about this candidate (Famous Last Words™) so if no new regression is found, the next build should hopefully be the stable release! If you haven't tried 3.3 RC builds yet, now would be a great time to do it to help us ensure everything upgrades smoothly from 3.2.3 to 3.3.

If you have anything you want to share with the Godot development community please let me know by sending an email to contact@godotes.com