According to VGInsights, about 13% of games released on Steam in 2024 used a custom engine, down from 71% in 2012¹. So looking at this trend, why should anybody try to make their own game engine?

Two weeks ago, I announced that my talk was accepted for CppCon 2026, happening in about a month in Denver (on Tuesday, September 15th, to be more exact). The talk is about building a small but non-trivial C++ game engine and all the nice things modern C++ provides to help with this task; you can find it in the CppCon schedule. I was not very comfortable giving a purely theoretical talk without any practical example to back it up.