Most people who ask which engine to use are not asking a technical question. They're looking for a decision that feels productive but requires no actual work, and comparing engines is perfect for that. You can spend a weekend reading feature checklists and end it with a browser full of tabs and zero lines of code.
Here's the uncomfortable part: for your first several projects, all four of these engines can make the game you're picturing. The 2D platformer, the top-down shooter, the little narrative thing. None of them will be the reason you don't finish. You will be the reason, or scope will be the reason, and the engine gets blamed because it can't defend itself.
So the useful version of this question isn't "which is best." It's "which one gets out of my way when I'm stuck at midnight and nobody's around to help." Let's answer that one.
Why the feature comparison is a trap
Open any engine comparison and you'll see a grid of green checkmarks. Physics? Yes. 3D? Yes. Particles? Yes. Cross-platform export? Yes, yes, yes, everyone says yes.
The grid is technically accurate and completely useless, because it measures whether a feature exists, not whether you can reach it without three days of grief. Every engine supports 2D. That doesn't mean every engine makes 2D pleasant. The checkmark hides the entire experience of using the thing.
What actually differs between these engines isn't the feature list. It's three things the grid never shows: the shape of the community you'll be asking for help, what happens the moment you hit a wall, and what your export targets quietly cost you later. Frame it that way and the choice gets a lot smaller.
The community is the real documentation
When you're stuck — and you will be stuck, often, for reasons that will later embarrass you — you're going to type your problem into a search bar. What comes back depends entirely on which engine you picked.
Unity has the deepest well of tutorials and forum answers, accumulated over more than a decade. The catch is that a lot of it is stale. You'll find a perfect answer written for a version from years ago, follow it exactly, and discover the API it relies on was renamed twice since. Great community, poor expiry labelling.
Unreal has strong documentation and a serious community, but it skews toward people building bigger, more technical things. Search a beginner problem and the answers sometimes assume you already know five other things. It's a room full of experts, which is wonderful once you can speak the language and intimidating before that.
Godot has a smaller but unusually current community, partly because the engine moved fast and old answers stopped working, so people rewrote them. The official docs are genuinely good. The downside is that for any given obscure problem, there may simply be fewer humans who've hit it before you.
GameMaker has a tight, long-running 2D community. For the kind of game it's built for, the answers are there and they're relevant. Step outside 2D and you're mostly on your own, but you shouldn't be there anyway.
Pick the community whose answers you can actually use tonight, not the biggest one.
What happens when you hit a wall
Every engine feels fine in the tutorial. The real test is the first problem the tutorial didn't cover, because that's where the engine's actual personality shows up.
With GameMaker, the wall tends to be a ceiling. It's fast and comfortable for 2D, and then one day you want to do something it wasn't designed for and the comfort ends abruptly. That's not a flaw — knowing what an engine refuses to do is a feature. It just means you should be confident your game lives inside its lane.
With Godot, walls are usually small and frequent rather than large and rare. The engine is light, it opens instantly, and when something's missing you often just... build it, because the whole thing is legible. The scene system clicks for some people immediately and takes others a week to stop fighting.
With Unity, the wall is often decision paralysis. There are four ways to do everything and the internet disagrees about all four. Enormous flexibility, and enough rope to build a very elaborate mess before you notice.
With Unreal, walls are steep but well-supported. Blueprints let you get a shocking amount done without writing code, which flatters your early progress. Then you need to do something Blueprints handle awkwardly, and you're looking at C++, and the machine that renders your gorgeous scene is also asking a lot of the machine you're developing on.
Ask yourself which failure mode you can live with. That's a more honest question than which engine is "powerful."
What your export targets actually cost
Everybody exports to desktop fine. The differences show up at the edges, and the edges are where shipping actually happens. If you already know you want to be on several platforms, read shipping on more than one platform without losing your mind before you commit, because the engine choice quietly decides how painful that gets.
Mobile, web and console are where engines separate. Web export is a real strength for lighter engines and a genuine weakness for heavy ones — an Unreal game in a browser is a big ask. Console export usually means dev-kit approval and platform-holder paperwork regardless of engine, but the tooling maturity varies a lot, and that's worth researching for your specific target rather than trusting a checkmark.
Then there's the money. Licensing terms for the commercial engines change over time and have burned developers before, so don't take my word or an old blog's — check the current terms yourself before you build a business on one. Godot's open-source licensing sidesteps that category of anxiety entirely, which for some people is worth more than any feature.
The rule: know your real export targets before you choose, not after. Retrofitting a platform onto a finished game is how a two-week port becomes a two-month one.
So which one
If you want a straight answer instead of a shrug:
Making 2D and you value speed and comfort over reach — GameMaker or Godot. Godot if you like owning your tools and want a path to 3D later; GameMaker if you want to be productive by this afternoon and your game is firmly 2D.
Making 3D, learning, and not sure yet — Godot for something light and legible, Unity if you want the largest hiring pool and tutorial library and can tolerate the version churn.
Building something visually ambitious in 3D, or you already know a team that knows it — Unreal. It rewards scale and punishes small projects that didn't need it.
Notice none of that hinges on a feature. It hinges on what you're making, who you can ask, and where you need it to run. If you want to see the range of what small teams actually ship, browse what's out there — you'll spot games from every one of these engines and no way to tell which from playing.
The one thing to do first
Stop reading comparisons, including this one. Pick the engine that matches your genre and your tolerance for its particular failure mode, then spend one evening rebuilding the same tiny thing — a character that moves and jumps, or a screen that loads another screen — from scratch, without a tutorial open.
That hour tells you more than every checklist combined. If the engine fights you on something that simple, you have your answer. If it doesn't, you've already started, which was the actual goal the whole time.
Common questions
Do I need to know how to code before picking an engine?
No, but be honest about how much you want to. Unreal's Blueprints and GameMaker's visual tools let you get far with minimal traditional coding, while Godot and Unity expect you to write scripts fairly early. If the idea of code makes you want to close the tab, that should weight your choice.
Is it a mistake to switch engines later?
Switching mid-project is painful and usually not worth it. Switching between projects is completely normal and makes you a better developer. Your first engine is a place to learn what you actually want, not a marriage.
Will using a free engine make my game look cheap or amateur?
No. Players cannot tell what engine a game was made in, and they don't care. Polish comes from time, taste and iteration, none of which the licensing model provides or prevents.
How do I stop myself from reinstalling everything to try the "better" engine?
Give yourself a hard rule: no re-evaluating the engine until you've finished one complete, tiny game and shipped it somewhere. The urge to switch almost always shows up right when the work gets hard, and switching feels like progress while being the opposite.