The biggest share of Unity is 2D mobile games, something Unreal is not particularly suited for and I very much doubted that segment of the market will switch to Unreal.

Defold, the engine by King that powers Candy Crush, is a solid free contender for 2D mobile games.

Unless a very major rewrite happened in the last few years, Defold absolutely does not power Candy Crush, in fact to my knowledge King has never shipped anything in Defold and it's fallen almost entirely out of favor internally.

All the Candy Crushes as well as several other games use variants of a custom internal engine that's managed by a fairly sizable central team.

Ah, you are correct about Candy Crush. After being promoted by your comment to investigate further, I see that King seems to only ever have released one game using the engine: Blossom Blast Saga in 2016, at least according to the showcase[1].

It seems that Candy Crush predates the engine by a few years and that the engine was originally created as a hobby project by one of the King employees, although it’s seen commercial use on mobile by a number of studios and has received backing from King and others over the years. King are not currently listed as a backer of the Defold Foundation, but one of the board members is the “director of engines” at King.

[1] https://defold.com/showcase/

most of the 2d ones are looking to Godot

I use Unreal professionally but on the side when I make smaller 2D games I am using Haxe/Heaps currently (although haxe/heaps can do 3d perfectly fine I'd probably stick with Unreal in that case due to experience).

Godot seems to be the way people are going right now though (I haven't tried it).

I also recommend for people to take a look at the haze library called Kha, if they are after the same kind of low level rendering that libraries like Monogame and Raylib offer.

Interesting, neat that you can run it inside a WPF app. I'll read up on that. I was a huge fan of monogame/xna back in the day.

How is Haxe in 2023? I tried to get into it a few years back but somehow I couldnt quite break the barrier to entry where it was fun to use

It is very alive! The Discord is where most of us hang out, but there are quite a lot of new stuff to mess around with and use :). Check out...

- https://ceramic-engine.com/

- https://github.com/RobertBorghese/reflaxe

I just started using it after not using it for about 5 years. I used to use HaxeFlixel for making small pixel art games but moved on to heaps.

I'd say it's better than ever! I'm not a big VSCode user but it has some really nice integrations that it convinced me to use VSCode.

Here's an article on a neat stack that Shiro games uses https://haxe.org/blog/shirogames-stack/

Godot ia gaining market share like crazy and I wouldn't be surprised to see it overtake unity in the future.