We picked Godot's 11% over Unity's 30%. Here's why.

We ignored Unity's 30% market share and built for Godot's 11%. Six months later, here's why that bet is paying off.

Ziva is an AI plugin that lives inside the Godot editor. We process 5B+ tokens for game developers. When we started, everyone said to build for Unity first because that's where the users are. We didn't listen.

The math that made us look stupid

The GDC 2026 report breaks down engine market share like this:

• Unreal Engine: 42% (dominates AA and AAA)
• Unity: 30% (established indie studios)
• Godot: 11% (newer indie developers)

Building for 11% of the market when you could build for 30% or 42% seems like bad business. Multiple people told us this directly. "You're leaving money on the table." "Godot is a hobby engine." "Nobody ships commercial games with it."

Why we picked the 11% anyway

Three reasons, all technical:

1. Godot's files are text. Unity's are binary.

Godot stores everything as human-readable text: scenes (.tscn), scripts (.gdscript), resources (.tres). An AI tool can read and modify any file in a Godot project the same way it reads a Python script.

Unity stores scene and prefab data as binary serialization. The AI literally cannot parse a .prefab file. No model improvement fixes this. We wrote about this in detail on our blog.

2. The community is tight and growing fast.

Godot has 108,527 GitHub stars. At the GMTK Game Jam 2025, Godot held 39% share, up from 13% four years earlier. The subreddit has 307K members.

When someone in r/godot recommends a tool, people actually try it. Our first 100 users came entirely from answering questions on Reddit and Discord without even mentioning Ziva. People clicked our profile, saw what we built, and signed up.

3. No competition.

Unity has GitHub Copilot integration, Cursor support, multiple AI plugins. Godot's AI tooling was basically nonexistent when we started. We didn't have to be better than Copilot. We just had to exist and be good. Being first in a growing market beats being tenth in a mature one.

What actually happened

Six months of data from building Ziva for Godot:

What worked:

• Reddit/Discord community engagement: our #1 acquisition channel
• Free tier with real value ($3/month AI balance, no credit card): converts browsers to users
• SEO blog posts about Godot-specific problems: took 4 months to compound but now drives consistent traffic
• Fast founder replies in Discord (under 5 min most days): turns users into advocates

What didn't work:

• Product Hunt launch: tourists, not buyers. We wrote about this.
• Cold outreach to game studios: zero conversions
• "AI for game dev" positioning: too vague, nobody searches for that
• Paid ads: our niche is too small for ad targeting to work

The surprise:
40% of usage is debugging, not code generation. The feature we almost didn't build (automatic error log reading) is the one people actually pay for. Code generation is only 20% of usage.

The pricing question everyone asks

We charge $20-$200/month depending on AI usage. Free tier gets $3/month of AI balance. Most paying users are on the $20 or $50 tier.

The mental model: we give you roughly 3x your subscription cost in AI balance. A $50/month user gets $150 of AI spend. This works because LLM pricing is dropping fast and our margins improve every quarter as models get cheaper.

No lifetime deals. No AppSumo. We want recurring revenue from users who get ongoing value.

Would I pick Godot again?

100% yes. The 11% market share number is misleading because it measures where the industry is, not where it's going. Godot's growth curve tells you where the next generation of game developers is landing.

If you're building a dev tool and deciding which platform to target: go where the architecture helps you and the community is growing, even if the absolute numbers are smaller. The 11% that's doubling every 2 years beats the 30% that's flat.

Build for Godot? Try Ziva free.