The Game Engines Behind Your Favourite Games - Used By Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, & More

You’ll hit a game engine screen whenever you freshly boot a game. An impatient version of you will mash a few buttons to skip it, but you’ll still catch the likes of Unreal Engine, Unity, and Frostbite flash past on your display.

Game engines are software toolkits that handle the rendering, physics, audio, animation, and so on, in games. Today, we’ll cover the most popular engines behind your favourite games and detail what makes them different.

Anvil

Who runs it: Ubisoft, developed by Ubisoft Montreal

Popular games: Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Rainbow Six Siege, For Honor

Anvil is a proprietary game engine for Ubisoft Studios, so it isn’t one that other developers can license and use. 

It powers densely populated open-world games, providing thousands of non-player characters (NPCs) on the screen at once.

Those non-player characters are immensely detailed and are joined by accurate playable characters with realistic hand and foot placement on surfaces thanks to the HumanIK middleware. That’s why parkour within Ubisoft games looks so good.

Assassin's Creed Shadows (2025) introduced the latest Anvil as we know it. Its ray-traced reflections provide realistic water and lighting, and there are now dynamic seasons that change the world across the year.

Unity

Who runs it: Unity Technologies

Popular games: Pokémon GO, Hollow Knight, Among Us

Unity is proprietary but also has an open license. Studios can license and use it in their games. It has given us some brilliant 2D/3D crossover games over the last decade due to its handling of both dimensions natively.

Games like Cuphead (hand-drawn 2D animation) and Ori and the Will of the Wisps (2D platformer) use the same engine as the 3D city builder Cities: Skylines.

What you see is those gorgeous games. Behind the scenes, Unity uses something called IL2CPP - it converts C# code before building and is the iOS and console default as it’s the only option on platforms that don’t allow just-in-time compilation.  

As it’s the standard pick, many of the games you download on your smartphone or tablet will use the Unity game engine.

Unreal Engine

Who runs it: Epic Games

Popular games: Fortnite, Silent Hill 2 Remake, The Elder Scrolls IV (Remastered)

Unreal Engine is a favourite for studios switching from their in-house engines. 

It’s the default for many big-budget studios, found in platformers, RPGs, shooters, fighting games, horror titles, and the categories in between. Also, it has Blueprints, a drag-and-drop system for developers to connect logic instead of writing code.

Studios can use Unreal Engine for free and then pay royalties once their game surpasses $1 million in lifetime revenue. That makes it very popular. 

We’re up to version 5.7, which brought about Nanite Foliage for dense vegetation and Substrate, a new material system for layered effects like wet skin.

Frostbite

Who runs it: Electronic Arts, originally built by DICE

Popular games: Battlefield 2042, EA Sports FC 25, Dead Space (2023)

Frostbite is EA’s general in-house engine. It’s best-known as a destruction engine for games with real-time collapses and such. Battlefield was the original game for development, but it’s now found across several categories, including sports.

Up until December 2023, EA pushed studios to use Frostbite as some internal measure to keep the ecosystem tight. EA now allows studios to use other engines. 

To be candid, Frostbite doesn’t fit non-shooter games as well as the likes of Unreal and Unity. There’s one exception: EA’s own sports titles (FC, Madden, etc.), where Frostbite is a known entity, and developers can bring out the best of it.

Frostbite’s latest update came along with Battlefield 6 and the Tactical Destruction system for reshaping - rather than smashing around - the battlefield.

Godot

Who runs it: The Godot Foundation, a non-profit

Popular games: Brotato, Dome Keeper, Slay the Spire 2

Godot’s the only game engine on our list that’s free to use, open source, with no licensing requirements whatsoever. 

You’d be right in thinking that it’s popular with indie developers and solo artists for that reason. Mega Crit, which built Slay the Spire 2, moved over from Unity to Godot mid-development to avoid runtime fees.

The defining feature of Godot is its node-and-scene system. Every part of a game that uses Godot is built using small, reusable pieces. The scripting language is GDScript or C#. It’s lightweight, with the editor around 100MB and able to run on any laptop.

2D games are Godot’s bread and butter, although the Godot 4.x cycle, from 2023, has given it solid 3D capabilities.

Additional reading: Find out more about the studios behind your favourite games at our dedicated page. Plus, view the latest game deals.