The best free 3D game engines, and what they cost when you succeed
2 min read
By Eduardo Orellana ·
Most 3D engines are free to start. The difference shows up later, if your game does well: some take nothing, some take a royalty, some ask you to upgrade. That later cost is the one to check before you begin.
Godot: free with no royalty
Godot is open source under the MIT licence, with no royalties or fees. Its 3D has improved a great deal in the 4.x releases, and its latest stable version on 26 September 2026 was 4.7.2.
It is lighter than Unreal and Unity, starts fast and runs well on modest computers. Its 3D is less proven at the very high end, and more than enough for most indie games.
Unreal Engine: free until $1 million
Unreal is free to use. Games owe Epic a 5% royalty on lifetime gross revenue above $1 million per product, and sales on the Epic Games Store are royalty-free.
It has the best high-end graphics of any free engine. It is also large, demanding on hardware, and built for C++ and its visual Blueprints system.
Unity Personal: free under $200K
Unity Personal is free for individuals and small organisations with less than $200K of revenue and funds raised in the last 12 months. Above that, you move to a paid plan.
It has the largest library of tutorials and assets of any engine. Scripting is in C#.
O3DE and Stride: fully open source
O3DE, the Open 3D Engine, is open source and backed by the Open 3D Foundation and its member companies. It is powerful and complex, and suited to experienced teams.
Stride is a free, open-source C# engine under the MIT licence. It is a good fit for developers who like C# and want no licence strings.
What 3D costs beyond the engine
Models, animation and lighting are where 3D gets expensive, whichever engine you pick. A free engine does not make a 3D game cheap to make.
For a first 3D game, keep the world small and the characters few. The engine matters less than the scope.
Which to choose
No royalty and a light engine: Godot. The best graphics and a royalty above $1 million: Unreal. The biggest ecosystem: Unity. Full open source with C#: Stride.
Try the smallest version of your idea in two of them over a weekend. How an engine feels in your hands, how quickly you get a character moving in a room, tells you more than any comparison table.