A often repeated mantra I hear is that the 3 most popular/best game engines are as follows: Unity, Unreal, Godot but what if I was to tell you that, that isn't exactly correct. Now of course "best" is very subjective and highly depends on a artists needs but most popular is much more objective. So what are the most popular game engines?
At least on desktop and including hobby gamedevs accourding to itch.io's engine most projects list and itch.io's framework most projects list are Unity at a massive 115k projects, Construct at 34.2k projects, and Godot who recently reached third place at 17.3k projects over taking GameMaker: Studio's 17.1k projects (GameMaker slowed down most likely due to switching to a subscription model which caused a lot of it's userbase to mov to Godot). So I guess the real answer to the most popular game engines are Unity, Construct, and Godot.
But what about the full list as of 9-10-2023? (Yes I finished this nearly 2 months after creating the html page):
Now I find this list interesting because it shows that you can make projects in any engine and you shouldn't feel like you need to be limited to just Unity, Unreal, and Godot. So I encourage you to take another look at the list above or the itch.io page and try out a new game engine and see if you like it and to help expand your concepts of how to make a game. Finally keep in mind that this is only itch.io's numbers and depending on the platforms chosen you could likely get very different results. I only bring this idea up at the end to remind everyone that truth be told the most popular game engine of all time is most likely Scratch.