Best Game Development Software for Windows

Unity

Unity Technologies

The leading platform for creating interactive, real-time content. Build 2D, 3D and VR games and apps at speed. From artist tools to live-ops, everything you need to bring your vision to life today. The complete solutions for professionals to create and operate. Create and operate amazing applications and immersive experiences with a complete solution for professionals across industries. Change up your splash screen. Or completely remove it. Gain greater insight into what’s happening in your game with real-time data on crashes, exceptions and user feedback. Minimize downtime with access to expert technical support when you encounter issues. Available as a separate purchase through a Unity sales representative. Unity Gaming Services: backend and LiveOps services trusted by world-class studios to support multiplayer and live games at any scale, with any engine or tech stack.

14 Ratings

Starting Price: $35.00/month

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Unreal Engine

Epic Games

The world’s most open and advanced real-time 3D creation tool. With Unreal Engine, you can bring amazing real-time experiences to life using the world’s most advanced real-time 3D creation tool. From first projects to the most demanding challenges, our free and accessible resources and inspirational community empower everyone to realize their ambitions. With over 160 hours of free online learning content, an extensive library of webinars, and options for instructor-led training, we have a way to learn that's right for you. Unreal creators are the true power behind Unreal Engine. Be part of a community that builds cutting-edge experiences, and supports each other along the way. Explore comprehensive reference documentation, instructional guides, community-based support, and options for dedicated professional support.

4 Ratings

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Blender

Blender Foundation

Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline. Cycles is Blender’s built-in powerful unbiased path-tracer engine that offers stunning ultra-realistic rendering. Blender’s comprehensive array of modeling tools make creating, transforming and editing your models a breeze. VFX professionals say: “Probably the best tracker in the market”. Blender includes production ready camera and object tracking. Allowing you to import raw footage, track the footage, mask areas and see the camera movements live in your 3D scene. Eliminating the need to switch between programs. Thanks to the high quality rigging and animation tools, Blender is being used for numerous short films, advertisements, TV series and feature films now.

8 Ratings

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Roblox

Roblox’s mission is to bring the world together through play. We enable anyone to imagine, create, and have fun with friends as they explore millions of immersive 3D experiences, all built by a global community of developers. Roblox is powered by a global community of over two million developers who produce their own immersive multiplayer experiences each month using Roblox Studio, our intuitive desktop design tool. Any experience imaginable can be created on Roblox. Roblox is ranked as one of the top online entertainment platforms for audiences under the age of 18 based on average monthly visits and time spent (Comscore). Our popularity is driven purely by the community with millions of people signing up through word of mouth every month. Be creative and show off your unique style! Customize your avatar with tons of hats, shirts, faces, gear, and more. With an ever-expanding catalog of items, there’s no limit to the looks you can create.

2 Ratings

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Perforce Helix Plan

Perforce

Perforce Helix Plan is a real-time planning and project management tool designed to enhance collaboration across teams, offering flexibility in managing projects through various development methodologies such as SAFe, Scrum, Kanban, and more. It allows teams to track work, time, and progress in real time, providing comprehensive visibility and advanced features like capacity planning and project history. The tool integrates with existing workflows and tools, such as Helix Core and Helix ALM, for deeper traceability and smoother operations. With a user-friendly interface that adapts to individual team preferences, Helix Plan helps accelerate planning and decision-making, ensuring faster delivery and greater efficiency across development teams.

1 Rating

Starting Price: $28.00/month/user

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XSplit Broadcaster

SplitmediaLabs

Live stream and record your content with ease & share it to streaming services like Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, Mixer, etc. Start your broadcast today. XSplit is a live streaming and recording software designed for gaming, presentations and live events. This AI-powered software allows game developers to start live streaming of their games in pristine quality. The software also has a multilingual support team to assist you 24/7. Currently there are four members in the XSplit family: XSplit Broadcaster XSplit Gamecaster XSplit VCam XSplit Express Video Editor

1 Rating

Starting Price: $5.00/month

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O3DE

The Linux Foundation

Open 3D Engine (O3DE) is a modular, open source, cross-platform 3D engine built to power anything from AAA games to cinema-quality 3D worlds to high-fidelity simulations. No fees or commercial obligations. Apache 2.0-licensed. Managed by The Linux Foundation. O3DE's modular architecture is built for customization from day one. Each component—known as a Gem—can be adopted separately, giving you access to the specific functionality needed for your application. Add new editing tools, features, and development workflows to your projects. Choose from a variety of community-maintained Gems to extend and enhance the engine's capabilities in anything from AI and robotics to push notifications and VR. With our engine's SDK capabilities, you can use O3DE as a foundation for any type of 3D project you can imagine.

1 Rating

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Buildbox

8Cell

With Buildbox, creating games is simple. There is no programming needed. Choose from various templates, Smart Assets™, or Brainboxes™ to get started. Then preview your game in real-time. You can even make your own game from scratch. The only limit is your imagination. Buildbox 3 is our most advanced game creation software! With it, you can create both 3D and 2D games using no-code Smart Assets™ and Brainboxes™ or advanced low-code options. Buildbox Classic is our traditional drag and drop game maker. With it you can make a game without coding, and rapidly build and prototype 2D games only using templates. At Buildbox, we believe that creating games is for everyone. With our powerful software, we're breaking down the barriers of game development for creators like you. We believe that anyone should get the opportunity to bring their ideas to life. The only skill you need is imagination. And we're just getting started!

1 Rating

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C++Builder

Embarcadero

C++Builder is a fast, integrated design and development suite for modern apps. Are you ready to design the best UIs of your life? Our award winning VCL framework for Windows and FireMonkey (FMX) visual framework for cross-platform UIs provide you with the foundation for intuitive, beautiful user interfaces that wow on every platform: Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. Design your master UI layout once, then easily customize platform- and device-specific views without duplication of design effort. Drag-and-drop visual and non-visual components from the palette using our visual designer. Visually connect user interface elements to data sources using the LiveBindings Designer. Real-time design validation using Live On-Device Preview to broadcast the active form to multiple devices simultaneously. Add responsive design with resolution-aware components for desktop, tablets, and smartphones. Real, platform-specific native controls for an improved user experience.

1 Rating

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GDevelop

What makes GDevelop unique and so easy to use is the event system. Events are a powerful way to express the logic of your game, without having to learn a programming language. Unleash your creativity with GDevelop and create all kinds of games: platformers, shoot’em up, strategy, 8-bit, hyper-casual games... the sky is the limit. Express your ideas, big and small: you can prototype new features on your games in minutes, and refine them without limits. Making games has never been so easy and fast, with the visual editors provided by GDevelop. Use ready made objects from the asset store or create your own from scratch. Choose sprites, particle emitters, texts, videos and many others to build the scenes of your game. Add effects to the layers and objects of your scene. These effects allow to quickly changes the atmosphere and rendering of your game in one click.

1 Rating

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Core Games

Core

As a Creator on Core, you have access to the full power of the Unreal Engine, thousands of free, professional music, art, and sound assets, and an industry-leading monetization system. The Core editor comes with thousands of built-in 3D shapes, props, and materials to use as a basis for creating new models. All original models for games are made using this content, which is downloaded with the Core Launcher itself, so games and projects can be loaded almost instantaneously. Core offers polished game starter templates including Team Deathmatch, King of the Hill, Battle Royale, Dungeon Crawler, Racing, and more. Game frameworks allow Creators to launch into the game development process much faster in those games.

1 Rating

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articy:draft

Articy

Interactive stories are complex by nature. articy:draft 3 is helping hundreds of game writers, narrative designers and other interactive storytellers to keep track of all their storylines and manage their narrative content in a visual way. Write branching dialogue with ease, reference characters and items in text to keep all your context at hand, create templates to adapt the information to your story world, add global variables, script your story logic and test it right inside articy:draft in a visual way, before you write a single piece of code. When done, the helpful exports to Unity, Unreal or JSON will help you get all your content into the engine of your choice. Download the FREE Standalone version and start exploring all your interactive story ideas right away.

Starting Price: €5.99 Single User per month

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Character Creator

Reallusion

Character Creator (CC) is a full character creation solution for designers to easily generate, import and customize stylized or realistic character assets for use with iClone, Maya, Blender, Unreal Engine, Unity, or any other 3D tools. CC connects industry-leading pipelines with one system for 3D character generation, animation rigging, asset management, look-dev rendering, and interactive design. Whether humans, creatures or props, creativity is no longer limited by the existing CC character base. Any rigged biped models can be imported, characterized, and facial rigged in Character Creator. New features now make any character compatible with thousands of motion assets, ready for natural lip-sync, motion capture, and animation controls in iClone. CC characters can also be optimized for low-poly, high-performance crowd simulation, AR, VR, and Metaverse.

Starting Price: $299

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Avoyd

enkisoftware

Avoyd Voxel Editor and Renderer Create, import, export and render large voxel worlds. 3D art and rendering tool for voxel artists, map builders and game developers. Main Features: - Large scenes up to 256k voxels a side. - CPU and GPU path traced rendering. - Export to optimised mesh glTF and OBJ with physically-based materials parameters, and VOX. - Import MagicaVoxel VOX, Minecraft maps, heightmaps, palettes. - Orthographic projection with Isometric presets. - Up to 65k physically based materials. - Physically based light and atmosphere

Starting Price: €15 one-time payment

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G+AIDER

AJU QMS

Automated testing software for mobile games. G+AIDER reduces your time and efforts of cross-devices and cross-platform mobile game testing. G+AIDER support the automated and the manual testing. With simple writing automation script, it will test on the multi devices across iPhone and Android. G+AIDER are using image recognition, so testers can easy to test on different devices. In the manual mode, G+AIDER mirror the device screen as the maximum size of PC, and it shows the device performance at the same time. After testing, manual mode generates the video, recorded playing, and the performance report. In business version, G+AIDER is able to multi testing. With one automation script, it will test up to 7 different devices, which is connect to PC. For testing iPhone, is only available on the Mac.

Starting Price: $120 / month / seat

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Incredibuild

Incredibuild is the leading platform for development acceleration. Our platform speeds up developer and CI builds with our distribution and caching technologies, cutting down wait times from hours and days to minutes. Most importantly, we do so without changing your code, tools, or processes, on prem or on the cloud. Incredibuild gives you better visibility into your builds, significant acceleration, and smarter build asset orchestration for 8-10x faster builds. 200,000 devs and managers at over 2,000 companies, including world-leading brands like Microsoft, Amazon, Citibank, Adobe, Disney, Intel, Samsung, EPIC Games, Nintendo, and many more rely on Incredibuild to turbocharge their development and continuously delight their customers.

Starting Price: $0

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Xsolla

Xsolla is the video game ecommerce platform powered by Transaction Engine and Business Engine to help developers and publishers market, sell, connect and optimize their games globally. Serving only the video game industry, the Xsolla Transaction Engine and Business Engine work seamlessly together to solve the complexities of distribution, marketing and monetization so developers, publishers and platform partners can increase their audience, sales and revenue. Market, sell, connect, and optimize your game with one platform, powered by Xsolla Transaction Engine and Business Engine. Accessible solutions that combine our products, industry connections, and expertise to meet your company’s specific needs. Great games can emerge anywhere. We at Xsolla are here to ensure the best ideas get made, get seen, and get played. So we've built a suite of products that remove the barriers between creators and the support they need.

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PlayFab

Microsoft

The game industry's most powerful backend platform. Sign up for a developer account and explore all the ways you can control your game with Azure PlayFab's easy-to-use web interface. Ready to start integrating your game? Pick your SDK, fill in your credentials, and you're off and running! Everything you need to build and operate a live game. Meet players where they are and connect them with friends on any platform. Dynamically scale dedicated multiplayer servers. Keep players coming back for more. Gain immediate insight into game performance and potential issues. Import, store, process and export data generated by your games. Comply with GDPR, COPPA and other government regulations. Process payments, manage virtual currency, sell catalog items and guard against fraud. Help players build relationships and communities. Configure custom operations and react to events in real-time. Set up your virtual economy, add leaderboards or craft the perfect matchmaking logic.

Starting Price: $99 per month

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Maya LT

Autodesk

Create and animate realistic-looking characters, props, and environments using the sophisticated 3D modeling and animation tools in Maya LT™ 3D game development software. Send assets directly to Unity and Unreal Engine with custom export tools, or use the game exporter to get 3D content into your engine of choice. Use an array of tools to create high-quality textures and materials. Work with Allegorithmic Substance materials directly in the software.

Starting Price: $35 per month

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Zebedee

From high-stakes esports tournaments to casual mobile games, our world is open to everyone. Bitcoin is programmable money. We make it a seamless part of the game experience. If you can scan a QR code, you can earn with Zebedee. Straightforward, instant, and available now. Play our games or play with our APIs. Either way, you'll soon discover why Bitcoin is transforming the world of gaming. Open a new acquisition channel and revenue stream in the quickly growing world of Bitcoin gaming. Gain an edge over your competition by offering cutting-edge Bitcoin Lightning services and a gateway into the exploding world of Bitcoin gaming. Play a single intense match with live Bitcoin transfers and earn a share of the prize pot based on your percentage of the total score. In survival mode, your sats are your life. When you score, you get an extra life. When you die, you lose some life. If you run out of seats, you get kicked from the match.

Starting Price: Free

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Nakama

Heroic Labs

Nakama is an open source game server framework developed by Heroic Labs, designed to facilitate the creation of real-time, multiplayer, and social games across various platforms, including Godot, Unity, Unreal Engine, and more. It provides a comprehensive suite of features such as real-time multiplayer capabilities, customizable matchmaking algorithms, leaderboards, in-game chat, and support for in-game currencies. Developers can extend Nakama's functionality using server-side logic written in Go, TypeScript, or Lua, allowing for authoritative game mechanics and enhanced control over game state. The platform also offers open-source client libraries tailored for different game engines and languages, ensuring seamless integration and flexibility in game development. Nakama is your dedicated server, not another multi-tenant SaaS. Add custom features and secure authoritative gameplay logic directly to your game server.

Starting Price: Free

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raylib

raylib is a simple and easy-to-use library to enjoy video game programming. It is a programming library to enjoy video game programming; no fancy interface, no visual helpers, no GUI tools or editors, just coding in a pure spartan-programmers way. raylib does not provide the typical API documentation or a big set of tutorials. The library is designed to be minimalistic and be learned just from a cheat sheet with all required functionality and a big collection of examples to see how to use that functionality. The best way to learn to code is by reading code. raylib supports multiple target platforms, it has been tested in the following ones but, technically, any platform that supports C language and OpenGL graphics (or similar) can run raylib or it can be very easily ported to. You can use raylib with multiple programming languages, there are over 60 bindings. raylib can be combined with several extra libraries for additional functionality.

Starting Price: Free

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Visual Studio

Microsoft

Full-featured IDE to code, debug, test, and deploy to any platform. Code faster. Work smarter. Create the future with the best-in-class IDE. Develop with the entire toolset from initial design to final deployment. Improved IntelliSense performance for C++ files. Local development with many common emulators. Simplified test access in Solution Explorer. Git management and repo creation in the IDE. Kubernetes support now included in Microsoft Azure workload. It doesn’t matter what type of app you are building, what language you program in, or what OS you’re on; with Live Share you can instantly share your project with your peers from the comfort of your own tools. No need to clone a repo or set up the environment, to get sharing.

Starting Price: $45.00 per month

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Hologress META-TAILOR

Hologress

With META-TAILOR, You can dress 3D characters the way you dress. Naturally, layer and style clothes to make game-ready outfits. Build outfits using our expansive clothing library. Combine hundreds of high-quality 3D clothes. With more added all the time. You can also import your own clothes obj. Craft game-ready 3D outfits in a way that is familiar and natural. Enjoy unlimited exports from our clothing library. Import characters from popular 3D platforms. Enjoy game-ready topology. Standard on all of our clothes. Skip straight to animation, with automatic skin weights. New features, updates, and 3D clothes are added all the time. Transfer characters to target platforms in just a few clicks. Clean, game-ready, low poly mesh topology. Animation ready with auto-skin weighs generation. Its sucks when you're trying to create something great, only to be delayed by overly technical workflows. META-TAILOR takes the time & difficulty out of putting fitted clothes onto real-time 3D characters.

Starting Price: $299 one-time payment

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Wwise

Audiokinetic

Wwise is a cross-platform interactive audio middleware solution for software developers who need to integrate interactive audio into video games and other immersive audio projects. Wwise increases the productivity and creativity of the entire team, simplifies the work of programmers, and empowers audio teams to deliver superior immersive gaming and interactive audio experiences. Wwise offers real-time in-game preview capabilities and a rich set of functionalities, including sound authoring, dynamic mixing, 3D spatial audio, interactive music, and synthesis. Wwise integrates seamlessly with all major game development platforms, including Unreal Engine, Unity, Cryengine, and many others. Developers also have access to complete API and SDK toolkits. Over 1000 game and AR/VR titles are developed every year using Wwise, and with partnerships with the largest developers worldwide, 70% of the global AAA game market uses Wwise.

Starting Price: Free for Indie developers

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AppWarp

ShepHertz Technologies

AppWarp is a powerful real-time multiplayer game development framework that enables seamless integration of interactive online gameplay across multiple platforms. Supporting over 18 SDKs, including iOS, Android, Unity3D, and Cocos2Dx, it allows developers to create engaging real-time and turn-based multiplayer experiences effortlessly. AppWarp offers essential features like matchmaking, connection stability, and cross-platform functionality, ensuring smooth gameplay interactions. Developers can leverage its intuitive client-side tools to manage virtual rooms, lobbies, and communication using a custom binary protocol. For those needing more control, AppWarp S2 provides an on-premise server solution, allowing developers to host their own authoritative game servers with advanced customization options such as server-side authentication and game logic.

Starting Price: $100 per month

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Metaplay

Metaplay is a powerful backend solution tailored for live-service Unity games, offering developers a fully customizable and scalable infrastructure. With its unique approach, game logic is written once in C# and seamlessly shared between client and server, ensuring consistency and efficiency. The platform's data-driven architecture allows developers to modify game economies and content dynamically, enabling real-time updates without requiring new client releases. Metaplay also provides advanced tools for debugging, testing, and offline development, streamlining the entire workflow. By offering full source code access, it grants developers complete ownership and flexibility, making it a superior alternative to traditional in-house backend systems.

Starting Price: €995 per month

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OpenGL

OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit, to achieve hardware-accelerated rendering. Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) began developing OpenGL in 1991 and released it on June 30, 1992. It is used for a variety of applications, including computer-aided design (CAD), video games, scientific visualization, virtual reality, and flight simulation. The OpenGL Registry contains specifications of the core API and shading language; specifications of Khronos- and vendor-approved OpenGL extensions; header files corresponding to the specifications; and related documentation including specifications, extensions, and headers for the GLX, WGL, and GLU APIs.

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Perforce Helix Core

Perforce

Perforce version control — Helix Core — tracks and manages changes to your source code, digital assets, and large binary files. But it does so much more than that. Helix Core helps development teams move faster, even as they develop more complex products. And it provides a single source of truth across development. Contributors can sync their work into Helix Core from the tools they’re already using. Plus, Helix Core can handle everything. 10s of thousands of users. 10s of millions of daily transactions, 100s of terabytes of data. And 10,000+ concurrent commits. It can even deliver files quickly to remote users without the WAN wait. And it can be used on-premises or in the cloud. Spend less time dealing with tools and processes — and more time delivering value. Helix Core ensures that everyone is efficient. You'll get fast feedback, flexibility, and automation for faster builds. Stop wasting your developers’ time with manual workflows — and let them get back to coding.

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Stencyl

Stencyl isn't your average game creation software; it's a gorgeous, intuitive toolset that accelerates your workflow and then gets out of the way. We take care of the essentials, so you can focus on what's important - making your game yours. The best Stencyl games have reached top slots in the App Store and Google Play while being featured under the "Best New Game" section under their respective stores. Our best web games have been sponsored by major publishers such as ArmorGames, Kongregate and Newgrounds. Our drag-and-drop gameplay designer pays homage to the successful MIT Scratch project. We extend Scratch's simple block-snapping interface with new functionality and hundreds of ready-to-use block, Power users can create and share their own blocks, extend the engine through code, import libraries and write their own custom classes that interact seamlessly with block-based Behaviors.

Starting Price: $99 per year

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Compare the Top Game Development Software for Windows as of April 2025

What is Game Development Software for Windows?

Unity

Unreal Engine

Blender

Roblox

Perforce Helix Plan

XSplit Broadcaster

O3DE

Buildbox

C++Builder

GDevelop

Core Games

articy:draft

Character Creator

Avoyd

G+AIDER

Incredibuild

Xsolla

PlayFab

Maya LT

Zebedee

Nakama

raylib

Visual Studio

Hologress META-TAILOR

Wwise

AppWarp

Metaplay

OpenGL

Perforce Helix Core

Stencyl

Best Game Development Software for Windows

Compare the Top Game Development Software for Windows as of April 2025

What is Game Development Software for Windows?

Unity

Unreal Engine

Blender

Roblox

Perforce Helix Plan

XSplit Broadcaster

O3DE

Buildbox

C++Builder

GDevelop

Core Games

articy:draft

Character Creator

Avoyd

G+AIDER

Incredibuild

Xsolla

PlayFab

Maya LT

Zebedee

Nakama

raylib

Visual Studio

Hologress META-TAILOR

Wwise

AppWarp

Metaplay

OpenGL

Perforce Helix Core

Stencyl

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