We built for Godot's 11% market share. Here's why.

Godot has 11% market share among game studios. Unity has 44%. Unreal has 28%. We built our AI tool for the smallest of the three.

13 months later, Ziva has paying users, a free tier that converts, and zero competition from the incumbents. Building for the "wrong" market was the best decision we made.

Why we picked Godot

When we started building an AI plugin for game engines in early 2025, the obvious play was Unity. Biggest market. Most developers. Most money.

Three things changed our mind:

• Godot's architecture is text-based. Scenes are .tscn files, scripts are .gd files, resources are .tres files. AI tools can read and modify everything. Unity and Unreal store critical data in binary formats that AI cannot parse. This is a technical moat that no amount of engineering can overcome in the other engines.

• Godot's GitHub stars grew from 50K to 108K in 18 months. The GDC 2026 State of the Game Industry report showed Godot's studio adoption rising from 5% to 11% in one year. The trajectory matters more than the current number.

• Nobody else was building for Godot. Unity has GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and multiple AI plugins. Godot had nothing. Being first in a growing market beats being seventh in a mature one.

What the numbers look like

Our pricing: free tier with $3/month AI balance (no credit card required), paid plans from $20/month.

The free tier was controversial internally. We worried it would attract users who never convert. Instead, it became our best growth channel. Developers install it, hit the free limit within a few sessions, and a meaningful percentage upgrade because they've already integrated it into their workflow.

Lesson for other founders: free tiers work when your product has high switching costs. Once someone's workflow depends on your tool, the friction of leaving is higher than the friction of paying.

What we got wrong

We overbuilt the first version. We shipped with 30+ features when 5 would have been enough. Code generation, scene editing, asset generation, debugging, documentation lookup, tilemap editing. Users only cared about three of them initially: code generation, error debugging, and documentation. We spent months on features that could have waited.

We underestimated how hard browser-based editors are. Our early prototype ran as a web panel inside Godot. The performance was terrible. We rebuilt it as a native GDExtension plugin, which took 2 months but made the experience 10x better. Should have done this from day one.

We priced too low at launch. Our initial paid plan was $10/month. Users who tried the free tier and liked it would have paid $20. We left money on the table for 3 months before adjusting.

Distribution that worked (and didn't)

Worked:

• Godot Asset Library listing (free, built-in discovery for Godot users)
• Reddit r/godot (our target audience literally hangs out there)
• SEO blog posts on ziva.sh (long-tail keywords like "best AI tools for Godot" now drive consistent traffic)
• Dev.to articles (high domain authority, ranks fast for developer queries)

Didn't work:

• Product Hunt (we wrote about this: Don't Post on Product Hunt)
• Twitter/X cold outreach (low engagement, felt spammy)
• Discord server (too early, not enough users to sustain conversation)

The niche market advantage nobody talks about

Building for a niche market means your customers find you through the community, not through paid ads. Every r/godot post, every Godot Asset Library search, every "best AI tools for Godot" Google query leads to us because there are so few alternatives.

In Unity's market, you're competing with Microsoft (Copilot), Cursor, and a dozen well-funded startups. In Godot's market, the biggest competition is open-source MCP servers that require technical setup. Different game entirely.

The niche also means faster iteration cycles. Godot's community is small enough that we can read every piece of feedback. Bug reports hit our Discord within hours. Feature requests come with context. We shipped 50+ Godot editor integrations because we could talk to every power user directly.

What's next

Godot 4.6 just shipped with major 3D improvements. Our AI tools are still mostly 2D-focused (tilemap editing, sprite generation). 3D is the next gap to fill, and we're the only team positioned to do it.

The broader trend: game engines are the next frontier for AI developer tools, and Godot is the only engine whose architecture makes deep AI integration possible. We bet on that 13 months ago. The bet is paying off.

If you're thinking about building for a "small" market: look at the growth rate, not the current size. And look at whether the architecture of that market gives you a structural advantage your competitors can't replicate.

ziva.sh - AI plugin for Godot. Free to start.

Ask me anything about building in a niche market or AI developer tools.