This is an update to the Mobile Game Engine Popularity Index I published 2.5 months ago.
Game Engine Popularity on Stackoverflow.com
stackoverflow tag popularity
Since November’s chart I made sure the tags I’m most interested in (cocos2d-iphone, cocos2d-x, sprite-kit) were properly applied to all questions.
Furthermore I update at least the past 6 months for each tag, which caused the graph to change noticeably. This may be due to policing the site, where users remove tags or retag questions. The net result is that there are now recent months with fewer questions for some engines compared to November’s chart. In particular this flattened the up-down curve of cocos2d-iphone.
Topics: Overall interest in cocos2d is waning. Unity and libgdx fighting for 1st place. Sprite Kit skyrocketing from day one.
This sums it up. Now for the details. Since my last game engine popularity measurement I tried to improve and streamline the process.
Game Engine Popularity on Stackoverflow.com
For stackoverflow.com data I’m searching for tagged questions created in a specific month. The search query looks like this:
[cocos2d-x] is:question created:2013-11
I repeated this for every tag for every month as far back as there were questions with the given tag.
How do you measure the popularity of a game engine and compare it with others?
Reminded of the TIOBE Programming Language Index and the Transparent Programming Language Popularity Index I couldn’t find a comparable site measuring game engine popularity.
So I sat down and concluded that I can do a simple manual test rather quickly. These are the measurements anyone can take easily:
- Forum topic, post and member counts (if available)
- Stackoverflow.com and gamedev.stackexchange.com tag counts
- Google search query results
Popularity of Cocos2D Variants
Let’s begin by comparing the popularity of the various Cocos2D variants. The difficulty here lies in properly excluding all the other cocos2d variants. That cocos2d-iphone is commonly referred to as just “cocos2d” makes it difficult to measure just the cocos2d-iphone popularity and to remove that number from all other engine variants.
I tried to overcome this by including or excluding specific tags in Stackoverflow and Gamedev searches:
- cocos2d-iphone: [cocos2d-iphone] or [cocos2d] -[python] -[java] -[javascript] -[c++] -[html5]
- cocos2d-x: [cocos2d-x] or [cocos2d] [c++] -[python] -[java] -[javascript] -[html5]
- cocos2d-android: [cocos2d-android] or [cocos2d] [android] -[cocos2d-x] -[c++] -[python] -[objective-c] -[html5]
- cocos2d-javascript: [cocos2d-js] or [cocos2d-javascript] or [cocos2d] [javascript]
- cocos2d (python): [cocos2d-python] or [cocos2d] [python]
- cocos2d-xna: [cocos2d-xna] or [cocos2d] [xna]
- cocos2d-html5: [cocos2d-html5]
- cocos3d: [cocos3d]
- kobold2d: [kobold2d]
- cocosbuilder: [cocosbuilder]
Stackoverflow.com tag search results:
Okay, let’s try that again with cocos2d-iphone removed so the other variants can be compared in relation to each other:
