{"slug": "ai-game-engine-why-ziva-is-built-inside-your-engine", "title": "AI Game Engine: Why Ziva Is Built Inside Your Engine", "summary": "Ziva, an AI agent for game development, is built inside the Godot editor with Unity in beta and Unreal support arranged per studio, because 87% of games released on Steam in 2024 were made with Unity, Unreal, Godot, or GameMaker, and all ten best-selling games in the US in 2025 shipped on licensed or in-house engines. The company argues that an AI product must live inside an existing engine rather than become a new one, citing that custom engines' share of Steam releases fell from 71% in 2012 to 13% in 2024.", "body_md": "# AI Game Engine: Why Ziva Is Built Inside Your Engine\n\nThe best AI game engine for a studio is the engine it already uses. Unity, Unreal, Godot, and GameMaker together built [87% of the games released on Steam in 2024](https://vginsights.com/assets/reports/The_Big_Game_Engines_Report_of_2025.pdf#page=9) , and every one of the [ten best-selling games in the US in 2025](https://www.gamespot.com/gallery/2025-best-selling-games/2900-6281/)  shipped on either a licensed engine or one its publisher built. That is why Ziva is an AI agent inside the Godot editor, with [Unity in beta and Unreal arranged per studio](/blogs/what-is-ziva), rather than a new engine that asks you to move your project.\n\n## Serious games are made inside game engines\n\nA [game engine](/blogs/what-is-a-game-engine) supplies the renderer, the physics, the editor, and the export pipeline. An AI product for game developers has to either live inside one of those or become one.\n\nThe Steam numbers make the choice for you. Video Game Insights tags the engine behind [more than 13,000 Steam games](https://vginsights.com/assets/reports/The_Big_Game_Engines_Report_of_2025.pdf#page=3) . In 2012, custom engines built 71% of the year’s releases. By 2024 that share was 13%, with Unity at 50%, Unreal at 28%, and Godot plus GameMaker at 9%.\n\nMoney follows the same pattern. Of all Steam units sold in 2024, [custom in-house engines took 42%, Unreal 31%, and Unity 26%](https://vginsights.com/assets/reports/The_Big_Game_Engines_Report_of_2025.pdf#page=10) , the first year custom engines fell below half. Split it by how much each game sold and both ends are engine-built:\n\nFor games that sold more than a million copies in 2024, [46% ran on custom engines, 31% on Unreal, 22% on Unity, and 1% on Godot or GameMaker](https://vginsights.com/assets/reports/The_Big_Game_Engines_Report_of_2025.pdf#page=7) . The engine changes with the budget. Having one does not. Godot is growing in from the small end: it reached [5% of 2024 releases with at least 1,000 lifetime sales](https://vginsights.com/assets/reports/The_Big_Game_Engines_Report_of_2025.pdf#page=6) , and the number of Godot games shipping on Steam is [roughly doubling each year](/blogs/godot-growth-stats).\n\nDeveloper surveys agree. Perforce and JetBrains’ [2025 Game Technology Report, from 521 developers in 49 countries](https://wnhub.io/news/analytics/item-48857) , found 58% of AAA respondents use Unreal, 34% use Unity, and 36% build at least part of their games on a proprietary engine.\n\n## Consoles run on licensed engines or in-house engines, nothing else\n\nConsole data is thinner, but it points the same way. Epic said in November 2022 that [more than half of the announced games for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S](https://80.lv/articles/epic-games-more-than-half-of-announced-next-gen-games-are-developed-on-ue/)  were being built on Unreal Engine, up from 48% earlier that year. Most of the rest run on engines their publishers built themselves. Circana’s ranking of the ten best-selling games in the US for 2025, [as reported by GameSpot](https://www.gamespot.com/gallery/2025-best-selling-games/2900-6281/) , shows both halves:\n\n| Rank | Game | Engine | \n|---|---|---|\n| 1 | Battlefield 6 | [Frostbite](https://www.pcguide.com/news/battlefield-6-producers-explain-why-theyre-sticking-with-frostbite-instead-of-something-generic-like-unreal-engine/)  , EA’s own | \n| 2 | NBA 2K26 | In-house. 2K does not name the engine; its new motion engine is [2K’s own ProPLAY technology](https://newsroom.2k.com/news/nbar-2k26-debuts-new-gen-9-gameplay-improvements-including-an-all-new-dynamic-motion-engine-powered-by-proplay)  | \n| 3 | Borderlands 4 | [Unreal Engine 5](https://www.unrealengine.com/developer-interviews/built-with-ue5-borderlands-4-delivers-ambitious-scale-with-world-partition-nanite-lumen-and-more)  | \n| 4 | Monster Hunter Wilds | [RE Engine](https://www.creativebloq.com/3d/video-game-design/how-monster-hunter-wilds-was-made-possible-by-capcoms-secretive-re-engine)  , Capcom’s own | \n| 5 | Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 | [Activision’s shared in-house engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IW_%28game_engine%29)  | \n| 6 | Madden NFL 26 | [Frostbite](https://www.ea.com/frostbite/games)  | \n| 7 | EA Sports College Football 26 | [Frostbite](https://www.ea.com/frostbite/games)  | \n| 8 | EA Sports FC 26 | [Frostbite](https://www.ea.com/frostbite/games)  | \n| 9 | The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered | [Unreal Engine 5 visuals on a Creation Engine core](https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2025/04/22/elder-scrolls-iv-oblivion-remastered/)  | \n| 10 | Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 | [Call of Duty’s shared in-house engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty:_Black_Ops_6)  | \n\nEight of the ten run on engines their publishers own. Borderlands 4 and Oblivion Remastered run on Unreal Engine 5, the latter over a Creation Engine core. None were assembled from libraries without an engine. Battlefield 6 senior producer David Sirland gave the reason in one line: [“This kind of destruction, what we do, isn’t possible in a generic engine.”](https://www.pcguide.com/news/battlefield-6-producers-explain-why-theyre-sticking-with-frostbite-instead-of-something-generic-like-unreal-engine/)  A studio’s engine is where its game’s identity lives, and that is exactly why no studio drops it for a new tool.\n\nGodot’s console story is honest about the gap. The Godot Foundation [does not maintain official console ports](https://godotengine.org/consoles/) , because console SDKs come with NDAs that an MIT-licensed project cannot sign, so W4 Games ships middleware for Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5 instead. The road to a console still runs through the engine.\n\n## What happens when the AI skips the engine\n\nAny AI game development tool that is not built inside an engine ends up on one of two paths.\n\n**Path one: edit the files, not the game.** Terminal and IDE agents such as Claude Code and Cursor are excellent at code, but on their own they see `.gd` and `.tscn` files as text. Reaching the scene tree, the debugger, or a running game takes a bridge: Unity’s May 2026 guide to [connecting Claude Code and Cursor through MCP](https://unity.com/blog/unity-ai-mcp-how-to-get-started)  requires Unity 6, the AI Assistant package, a Unity Cloud project, and a paid AI beta. Godot has community equivalents. Our comparisons with [Cursor](/blogs/ziva-vs-cursor-for-godot) and [Claude Code](/blogs/ziva-vs-claude-code-for-godot) cover what each can and cannot see.\n\n**Path two: become the engine.** AI game makers such as Rosebud generate [Phaser and Three.js JavaScript](https://lab.rosebud.ai/coding-for-kids)  that runs in a browser, and Summer Engine opens Godot projects in [an AI-first editor of its own](/blogs/ziva-vs-summer-engine). Phaser’s most famous game shows where that ceiling sits. Luca Galante started [Vampire Survivors in Phaser in 2020](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_Survivors) . The Xbox and mobile versions were built on Unity, and on August 17, 2023 the Steam version moved over too, because features such as local co-op had been [“very difficult, or borderline impossible, to develop on the old one”](https://vampire.survivors.wiki/w/Updates/Version_1.6:_New_engine_%26_Local_co-op) . The Switch version launched the same day, and PlayStation followed in 2024. Phaser’s own news site described a Steam release from October 2025 as [“one of the most unusual games to come out of the Phaser ecosystem”](https://phaser.io/news/2026/04/desktop-heroes-phaser-electron-steam) .\n\nAn AI product that builds its own engine has to earn what Unity, Unreal, and Godot spent a decade building, and then ask a studio to move its project. Studios do switch engines, but to another engine: Mega Crit [rebuilt Slay the Spire 2 on Godot after two years in Unity](/blogs/slay-the-spire-2-godot). The engine-free exception is real and small: Pieter Levels’ browser flight sim earns [over $50,000 a month](https://www.404media.co/this-game-created-by-ai-vibe-coding-makes-50-000-a-month-yours-probably-wont/)  in plain Three.js and will never need a console build. Our [vibe coding post](/blogs/vibe-coding-games) covers what that kind of project can and cannot grow into.\n\n## Who Ziva is for\n\nZiva is not for people who have never opened an engine. It is for developers who are months into a game and want the work to go faster without changing tools. That is where AI adoption actually happens: the [GDC 2026 State of the Game Industry survey](https://gdconf.com/article/gdc-2026-state-of-the-game-industry-reveals-impact-of-layoffs-generative-ai-and-more/)  found 36% of game professionals use generative AI, but only 30% of those working at studios. A tool that can only be adopted alongside a workflow change loses most of that 30%.\n\nSo Ziva installs [into an existing Godot project like any other plugin](/docs/installation). The agent reads the scene tree through the editor API, watches the debugger, takes screenshots of the editor, and runs the game to check its own work; the [API-level walkthrough](/blogs/ziva-scene-tree-3d-tilemap-evidence) shows each of those. Uninstall it and you still have a plain Godot project.\n\nJody Mitoma of JoMito Games is building Beat Boxy, a 3D rhythm runner headed for Steam, in Godot. He asked Ziva to find the largest memory, CPU, and GPU costs in his levels and [reported that the game ran “even smoother than it already was”](/blogs/made-with-ziva#steam-games), for a total cost of 58 cents. No migration, no new editor, no port.\n\n## The whole journey, not just the code\n\nBeing inside the engine also lets Ziva help with the parts of shipping a game that a code assistant never touches, all from the same panel in the same project:\n\n| Ask Ziva to… | What happens inside the engine | \n|---|---|\n| Add analytics | [One tool call installs an autoload](/docs/analytics) that tracks sessions, scenes, and custom events, with a hosted dashboard | \n| Add multiplayer | Ziva writes [the project settings for a hosted relay](/docs/multiplayer) that Godot’s built-in WebSocketMultiplayerPeer connects to | \n| Improve the frame rate | The agent profiles the project and edits the scenes and scripts that cost the most | \n| Playtest a feature | An [AI playtester](/full-game-tester) plays through the build and reports what broke | \n| Plan the next feature | Plan mode reads the project and helps [designers weigh a feature against the players they want to reach](/blogs/ziva-for-game-studios) | \n| Prepare for launch | The [publishing program](/publishing) covers platform builds, localization, and marketing support | \n\nNone of this requires removing anything from your toolkit. Ziva adds one dock to the editor you already open every morning, because that is where serious games are built and where the scenes, the debugger, and the export button live. [Add Ziva to your Godot project](/download), or see the [games made with Ziva](/blogs/made-with-ziva).", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-game-engine-why-ziva-is-built-inside-your-engine", "canonical_source": "https://ziva.sh/blogs/why-ziva-is-built-inside-a-game-engine", "published_at": "2026-09-05 00:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-07 02:09:28.165068+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "ai-tools", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Ziva", "Godot", "Unity", "Unreal", "GameMaker", "Steam", "Video Game Insights", "Epic"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-game-engine-why-ziva-is-built-inside-your-engine", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-game-engine-why-ziva-is-built-inside-your-engine.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-game-engine-why-ziva-is-built-inside-your-engine.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-game-engine-why-ziva-is-built-inside-your-engine.jsonld"}}