Nah, like you said, SDL is just window creation and a bit of audio etc. If that counts as a "game engine" then so does every web browser.

EDIT: Sorry if I seem grumpy, I'm not actually grumpy at you, I'm grumpy at PyGame for calling itself a game engine when really it's just SDL + the ability to blend images.

I wasn't alive or making games at the time, as I was a baby, but I believe SDL would have been understood as an engine when it released.

I wouldn't call it one nowadays, except in so far that someone looking for an engine might find themselves happy with SDL (or PyGame, etc)

> SDL would have been understood as an engine

SDL is funny in that it kind of is an engine, à la Raylib, with SDL_Renderer (2D only), but most people use it just as a platform abstraction layer.

I don't get it. SDL has an event/messaging queue, cross-platform hardware support, basic collision detection, it packs its own stdlib, a cross-platform file storage API, a camera API, a pen API, asynchronous I/O, metadata/property support using its own hashmap, a geometry API that lets you throw triangles at the GPU, and other things, but all 99% of people ever seem do with it is open a window and an OpenGL context.

I've seen plenty of projects where people use it and reimplement things it already does because they want to minimize dependency. The entire point of using a library like SDL is dependency! Use all the things!

> SDL is just window creation and a bit of audio etc.

It's a bit more than that, especially the current version. You're right that it isn't an engine in and of itself but you could probably build a decent engine on top of it. SDL3 + WASM + Lua would be chef's kiss.