Godot's Rise, the Challenges of AI Pull Requests, and Decompilers - Bastiaan Olij | grokludo 31

Bastiaan Olij leads XR development on the Godot engine, and is a member of the Godot foundation, which guides and works with its community of open source developers.

Over the last ten years, more open source alternatives to the Unity and Unreal engines have been popping up and growing, and Godot has enjoyed considerable momentum – assisted, it has to be said, by debacles such as Unity announcing (and then cancelling) its controversial runtime fee.

For developers looking to escape the bloated "everything" engines, Godot has been waiting with open arms and a permissive, "do anything" MIT licence, as well as a helpful community and a single exe file that makes it easy to try.

In this episode we talk about Godot's governance and how it charts a path forward with its community, how it's dealing with the challenges of AI pull requests, and the bad-faith decompilers scaring devs away from sharing their games publicly.

I caught a talk by Bastiaan at the Every Game Talk Possible event, part of the Sydney Games Festival, in which he charted Godot's rise. At the recent GMTK Game Jam, one of the largest game jams in the world, 47%(!) of developers used Godot.

A pie chart titled "2026 - Game engines used to create 10,511 GMTK Game Jam Games" shows that 47% of developers used Godot, 34% used Unity, and the rest is divided between GameMaker, Unreal, and Other.

It's a function of the MIT licence that the Godot team isn't aware of all the projects using the engine – game developers aren't required to credit or notify them. But using data from SteamDB, the Godot team found that in just a couple of years, games made with Godot more than tripled.

A bar chart titled "Godot games released on Steam each year", with 2023 showing 376 games, 2024 showing 819 games, and 2025 showing 1,229 games.

So it's great to see an open source project doing so well and, to borrow a motto from Unity's early vision, "democratise game development."

But with that success, and with the rise of AI, Godot faces new challenges. A flood of AI pull requests is stretching resources and morale. And at the Every Game Talk Possible event, as well as in many online circles, a constant talking point is the worry that decompilers and AI scrapers can steal a game and beat the original developer to market.

No one has an answer for that yet, but Bastiaan puts forward some good reasons to be optimistic.

Enjoy!

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