I would agree with you that bevy is not fit for making a commercial game. but not because its not capable. Its just NEW. we are only now starting to see commercial games come out with godot and thats 11 years old. bevy came out what, late 2021? give it some time. It still needs more workflow tools, a level editor stable documentation and a bunch of other things.
It will get there. it just takes time.
Obviously not true, latest Bevy Jam has ~100 submissions! They might not be the games you were thinking about, but they're games nonetheless.
Beyond the game jams there are definitively people making games with Bevy too, but I don't think anyone of them gone mainstream (yet?) but it's a bit harsh to say no one is making games with Bevy when that's clearly not true.
It takes a long time for a game engine to be ready to create the kind of experiences you're probably thinking about, and even if everything goes great with Bevy in the future, it's still probably years rather than months until any big studio will think of start using it for something important.
With that said, people are for sure making games in Bevy even if the experience is non-optimal. Search on GitHub for "bevy" and sort by latest update and you get a snapshot of the projects that are on GitHub, then imagine there is a magnitude more people working privately.
https://steamdb.info/stats/gameratings/2025/?min_reviews=500...
For me the experience is completely the opposite. ECS as a pattern lets me build way larger games with more complicated and interesting gameplay than I could build before without ECS. It's something about about easy it makes to create de-coupled functions and being able to easily put things under automatic testing that makes the whole process so much smoother. Before moving to Bevy I mostly used Unreal Engine and on two projects Unity, FWIW.
> I judge the viability of a game engine/framework based on its commercial success. This may be a bit harsh
I don't think it's harsh at all, I'd do the same if I was trying to build mainstream games, and I think many other peoples do so to.
But that's also very different than "Nobody makes games in Bevy though" which is what you said at first, which is a lot less charitable than what you wrote in your comment now. I understand it's an exaggeration, but it reads as you're sour about it, rather than being interested in a conversation about it.
And again, I am not sure what exactly people are expecting of a game engine that started development in 2019. Development of Tiny Glade itself started less than three years after Bevy's first commit, which was an obvious factor in Pounce Light building a custom renderer.
However, it doesn't even use Bevy's renderer, but their own: the devs mostly just care about its ECS. So it definitely isn't the showcase Bevy is looking for.
This stance is not necessarily wrong - life is short, after all, and not every cup of tea has to be drunk from - but it does make finding useful criticism in a haystack of generic talking points rather difficult.
The entire raison d'être of Bevy and the reason it is built how it is is that the ECS eliminates that. If your Bevy code contains something that looks like that, you are using it very wrong. You put the data in the ECS, and any gameplay code goes into some system that uses the queries to pull the data it needs out of it. If you need something like a backreference, you don't add one in an unholy tower of refcells, you just use a different query.
If you wanted to argue that a soup of mutually referencing objects is easier to deal with than having to use a query system, I'd disagree, but you'd have a valid argument. What you posted above just highlights that you don't know much about bevy.
Nobody makes games in Bevy though, Bevy is just a very good, modern graphics tech demo, not something suitable for developing actual games. Even the biggest title out there, Tiny Glade, is just a level editor with precisely zero gameplay features. Bevy's "popularity" (on social media, not among game developers) is entirely hype-driven by people that do not actually make games at all.