A Guide to Ditching US Tech (for Game Developers)

last updated September 2nd, 2026

At this point, it's clear that the government of the United States is neither trustworthy nor at all concerned with improving the lives of almost anyone. The same is true of major US technology companies.

This guide from Paris Marx is great, but its target audience is individuals trying to end their dependence on US-based software/services. This post is meant as a companion for anyone trying to reduce their team or organisation's dependence on the output of Silicon Valley (including those trying to do so from within the US itself).

I make video games at a studio that I founded, so the first section is going to be focused on the tools we use doing that specific kind of work (game engines, 3d modelling, etc). The second section is about team communication and collaboration tools that could be useful to teams working in other domains as well. (Of note, we're an entirely remote company, so many of the tools and processes are aimed at facilitating working together in that context, i.e. without a shared physical space)

When it came to replacing software we'd been using, we wanted options that:

• are not made by companies based in the US, or otherwise heavily tied to the US; and
• ideally are not shot through with a bunch of LLM "AI" garbage that nobody normal actually wants.

Free, open source software is a great thing that can produce amazing results, but I don’t have any problem paying for software from trustworthy teams that value their work and their users. (I mean, we’re paying our own rent by asking people to buy the video game-shaped software that we’ve made!) But there’s an entire universe of difference between high-quality software made by craftspeople who care about what they’re building, and software from a company run by someone in San Francisco deep in the throes of a psychotic folie à deux with their quad-harness Claude stackrig, themselves financially backed by odious VCs clamouring to lick the feet of MAGA neofascists.

Put another way, we’re comfortable using open source software developed by US companies if we can self-host it and the organisation doesn't seem to be run by total wankers.

What follows isn’t meant to be a list of “the best” alternatives – just the ones we’ve found viable after using them for a while. In some cases, I’ll mention a few others we looked at, and if you dig into alternatives, you might find something you prefer to what we’re listed here. That’s great! Feel free to email me about it and I might update this to include “People also like...” lists for some of these entries.

When it comes to ditching US (video game development) tech, it doesn't need to be an all-or-nothing approach. Simply binning Slack for an OSS alternative or switching from 3DS Max to Blender is meaningful.

The greater purpose here is to illustrate that there actually are a lot of alternatives to the dominant, US-based software and services in these areas, and it might not be as difficult as it seems to move away from organisations run by bad people with bad incentives who are making the world a worse place.

Game Engine: Godot (open source)

replacing Unity, Unreal Engine

While Unity isn’t technically based in the US, any meaningful traces of a Nordic disposition stemming from its original Danish roots vanished long ago. In terms of both its objectives and its governance, Unity is for all intents and purposes American. And with it looking like LLMs+Twitter have done to Tim Sweeney’s brain what shipworms do to the wooden hull of a three-masted schooner, Unreal is not a particularly enticing prospect either.

There are countless other places to get a rundown about the current state of Godot, but with very real and successful titles like Brotato, Slay the Spire 2, Case/Rise of the Golden Idol and The Roottrees are Dead having been made with Godot, there is plenty of evidence that Godot works just fine for teams making substantial titles.

Having come from using Unity previously, our experience has been that, yes, there is a bit of a learning curve, but there are all kinds of things that we prefer in Godot and in general the community around Godot is engaged, supportive, and generally rather lovely. The contrast with Unity’s now-backpedalled 'everyone has to give us a percentage of their game’s earnings based on a formula that even we seemingly don’t understand' could not be more stark.

There's also Defold (🇸🇪) which we haven't used, but seems to be more common building games for mobile platforms. It's open source and while originally developed by King (owned by Microsoft née Activision), it's now maintained by the independent Defold Foundation.

3D Modelling / Animation: Blender (open source)

replacing Maya, 3DS Max

This one feels like it goes without saying these days, but just in case: Blender is easily on par with Maya or 3DS Max in terms of features, except you don’t need to send a single penny to Adobe or Autodesk! There’s nothing not to love. Kane Parsons made his original Backrooms shorts in Blender and also mocked up a ton of things for the A24 feature film in Blender as well.

We make 3D games so I don’t feel sufficiently fluent to recommend art tools for 2D games. But please email me if you have positives experiences with tools that meet the requirements above for 2D art – whether for pixel art workflows or something illustrated or both – and I might update this post in the future.

Programming IDE: Jetbrains Rider (🇳🇱)

replacing Visual Studio

Rider is basically a one-to-one IDE replacement for Visual Studio, and there is a ton of information about it easily available. Rider’s Godot integration is quite solid both for C# and GD Script, and I used Rider exclusively for our last title, which we made using C# and Unity.

Audio Middleware: FMOD (🇦🇺) or Wwise (🇨🇦)

One thing I will note about Godot is that its features for audio are functional, but relatively rudimentary. Fortunately both of the major audio middleware packages out there are great, and both are made by subjects of His Majesty in Commonwealth nations.

We’re using FMOD because that’s what we’ve used before and there’s a Godot plugin that took me maybe 20 minutes to get set up and working. I haven’t investigated it in depth, but I believe there’s one available for Wwise as well.

Email: Fastmail (🇦🇺)

replacing Gmail/Google Workspace, Outlook, etc

Any hesitation I had about paying for email evaporated after about a day of using Fastmail. Support is always from an actual human person and they reply quickly, and both its desktop and mobile clients are great (but ofc any SMTP mail client still works if you don't want to change that).

The most common recommendation I see on this front on ProtonMail (🇨🇭) and while it’s totally viable — and arguably the most one-to-one replacement for what Google Workspace provides — I found there’s a bit more friction with Proton services than I’d like.

Being end-to-end encrypted means many of Proton’s services require some intermediary facilitation if you don’t want to use the clients they provide. If you already have a desktop email client you’re fond of, you’ll need to have a separate Proton Mail Bridge (a sort of email VPN) client running alongside your preferred email client. It’s fine, but it’s another thing to deal with, and the Proton Mail Bridge software is only available with paid plans so you can’t try it out without paying up front. (And I’m pretty sure that option doesn’t exist on mobile at all, so for Android/iOS, you’re required to use official ProtonMail app.) And at the end of the day we’re making video games here, not dealing with privileged or confidential information via email, so having end-to-end encryption really doesn’t offer us much.

Documentation / Notes: Obsidian (🇨🇦) or Craft (🇭🇺/🇬🇧)

replacing Notion, Confluence, etc

We’re still evaluating what we want to replace Notion with but it will likely come down to either Obsidian or Craft.

I like Obsidian for personal notes a lot, and my previous hesitation about using it across the team might be a bit alleviated by improvements made in Remote Sync vaults. Some very large organisations seem to be using Obsidian, including Dead by Daylight creator Behaviour Interactive in Montreal, so that gives some credence to it being good for more than just individual use.

Craft seems to be a pretty viable one-to-one Notion replacement as well.

Team Text Communication: kChat (🇨🇭)*

replacing Slack, MS Teams, etc

This gets a caveat because while I've finished setting up kChat for our team, we haven’t switched over using it day-to-day yet because we still have a couple of months left on our annual prepaid Slack subscription, and the only thing worse than paying Slack for something is paying them for nothing.

There are handful of other OSS options, like Zulip, Rocketchat and Mattermost, plus other paid alternatives like NextCloud (🇩🇪) and Wire (🇩🇪).

Coworking / Video Chat: WorkAdventure (🇫🇷)

replacing Zoom, Slack, Teams, etc

We have a virtual office that we all log into every day with persistent video, rather than just relying on text chat and scheduled video calls. We previously used Gather (🇺🇸), but recently moved over to WorkAdventure.

Because the purpose of this is to share non-US companies, I did want to note that while Gather is a VC-funded SF company, in a turn of events I have yet to see almost anywhere else, earlier this year they said 'actually, we’re not going to waste any more hours of our one human life crowbarring AI garbage that nobody wants into our video conferencing software.' (Their statement might have been slightly more PR-massaged than that, but you get the idea.)

Given that so many of the other platforms trying to solve this problem were either a) trash in terms of their video quality, b) used an outrageous amount of PC resources because they insist everyone inhabit a fully 3D Second-Life-but-its-a-bad-ayahuasca-trip avatar, or c) both, Gather might still be a more tenable compromise option than would otherwise be the case.

File Sharing: Jottacloud (🇳🇴)

replacing Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, etc

Tons of options here, but one I don’t see surfaced as much as it warrants is Jottacloud. I think it might be getting pigeonholed as being intended for photos, but it fully does what Dropbox does (just with extra nice photo support).

Domain Registration: Hover (🇨🇦)

replacing GoDaddy, NameCheap, Squarespace, etc

There are a ton of non-US alternatives here, but I want to shout out the Canadian folks at Hover. I’ve used them as a domain registrar for over 15 years at this point and I’ve never once had a problem.

Cloud Hosting: FullHost (🇨🇦)

replacing AWS, Azure, Digital Ocean, etc

There are also a ton of non-US alternatives here, but Full Host is Canadian and seemingly very reliable.

Websites: Ghost (open source)

replacing Squarespace, Substack (for the love of god), etc

The very words you’re reading right now have been channelled by (a) Ghost. Our websites are self-hosted Ghost installs running on FullHost, but the Ghost team provides fully managed hosting as well.

Newsletters: EmailOctopus (🇬🇧) or Buttondown (🇺🇸)*

replacing MailChimp, Substack (for the love of god), etc

We’re currently using Buttondown for our newsletter and while they're based in the US, they’re a small and (seemingly) non-VC backed company in Seattle, so that’s more tenable than some options.

We haven’t used it, but EmailOctopus is based in the UK and seem solid as an alternative to the US newsletter providers.

Bookkeeping: Xero (🇳🇿)

replacing Quickbooks, ZipBooks

You should have a real accountant do your tax returns, but if you manage your own day-to-day bookkeeping (we do) there are a lot of options that aren't Quickbooks. We switched to Xero for FY2026 and it's been great so far. There is also Freshbooks (🇨🇦), Wave (🇨🇦) and lots more. Finding one that works will with financial institutions in your country is probably the most important factor here.

International Money Transfer: Wise (🇬🇧)

replacing Paypal, your bank charging too much to do a wire transfer

We can't go back in time and stop Paypal from existing – as pleasant as that would be, considering the horrors wrought by those who profited massively from its sale to eBay – but it's possible to stop using to today, at least. Wise has been great for sending money abroad, and it integrates will with our banks here in Canada.

Ecommerce/Payment Processing: don't use Shopify (🇨🇦)

This is the one anti-recommendation, and not many game developers need direct payment processing anyway, but if you sell your merch or something via Shopify... probably do not do that.

Shopify’s founder and CEO has been (accurately) described as “Temu Elon Musk” and the rest of their corporate leadership isn’t any better. It’s a bummer since they’re here in Canada but the Great White North isn’t free of tech chuds, and Tobi Lütke is for sure one of our own native ghouls.

I can’t recommend any specific replacements as we haven’t ever needed this service, but Sellfy (🇱🇻) seems to be a pretty well-regarded Shopify alternative.

And once again, please feel free email/DM me any experiences you've had with the above or other alternatives. While I don't intend to make a massive ongoing project of keeping this up to date, adding a few addenda now and again is something I should be able to swing.