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Slay the Spire 2 is, quite handily, the most popular game ever made with the Godot engine, but the engine's operators say it was already comfortably on the rise.
In a new report on Godot's stats going into 2026, lead rendering maintainer Clay John examines the engine's rise in popularity through a couple of lenses. Some of the data is "a little messy," he admits, in its reliance on downloads from sites and sources like Github, Steam, and Google Play. But even with some "fragmentation," the trends are pretty consistent: Godot is gaining installs, downloads, and users.
Steam, via SteamDB, provides "the most exciting statistic," John says. "The data is approximate, and it can change when SteamDB updates their algorithm, but the overall picture stays the same. The number of Godot games being released on Steam is exhibiting strong signs of exponential growth!"
In 2023, 375 Godot-made games were released on Steam. One of them was Brotato, a top-down roguelike shooter that, before Slay the Spire 2 came along, held the crown of biggest Godot game on Steam.
In 2024, 819 Godot games hit Steam. Among them was Halls of Torment, another roguelike featuring a zillion enemies, which was the biggest Godot release of its year (by Steam peak players).
And in 2025, that figure jumped up to 1,229 Godot games released on Steam.
"It is amazing that many people are adopting the engine and using it, but as a person on the technical side of things, I also want to see that users are successfully using the engine to make their games," John says.
Godot has empowered hit games on Steam for years, but nothing has hit as hard as Slay the Spire 2. The deckbuilding roguelike – boy, roguelikes love Godot, huh – was originally made with Unity before the engine's abrupt fee changes pissed off developer Mega Crit so hard that it pivoted the entire project. In a 2023 post, Mega Crit said to Unity: "We have never made a public statement before. That is how badly you fucked up."
Slay the Spire 2 launched this year on March 5, and with a Steam peak of 574,638 players, it's not only miles ahead of Godot runner-up Brotato's 38,905 player peak, it's one of the biggest games of the entire year. It had the 20th biggest launch in Steam history, putting it in the same realm as mega-hits like Hollow Knight: Silksong and above games like Terraria and the Call of Duty hub (which is notably less Steam-reliant than most games). It's also one of the best games of 2026 so far, though a surge of negative reviews largely written by Chinese Steam users has tempered its rating on Steam.
Few things put eyes on a game engine like breakout hits using that engine, and Slay the Spire 2 demonstrated louder than ever that you can convert a project from Unity to Godot and use the engine to deliver a feature-rich, readily update-able, enormously deep game – which includes multiplayer, a major addition over the original Slay the Spire.
John lays out how Godot was already gaining ground as a free and open-source alternative to engines like Unity and Unreal, which still dominate the market. The Slay the Spire 2 effect may take a while to kick in given development time lag, but I wouldn't be surprised if it kickstarts the biggest wave of Godot games yet.
