Pygame vs pygame-ce: Which One Should You Install?

pygame-ce (pygame Community Edition) is a fork of pygame. In 2023 most of the people who were developing pygame moved their work to a new project they could run together, and published it on PyPI as pygame-ce. The original package, pygame, still exists.

For a learner the important part is that both are the same library to use: you write import pygame, and the same code runs on either.

import pygame

pygame.init()
screen = pygame.display.set_mode((480, 240))
clock = pygame.time.Clock()
font = pygame.font.Font(None, 36)

edition = "pygame-ce" if getattr(pygame, "IS_CE", False) else "pygame"
print(edition, pygame.version.ver)

running = True
while running:
    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
            running = False

    screen.fill((25, 28, 45))
    text = font.render(f"Running on {edition} {pygame.version.ver}", True, (255, 255, 255))
    screen.blit(text, text.get_rect(center=(240, 120)))
    pygame.display.flip()
    clock.tick(60)

pygame.quit()

The examples on these pages run on pygame-ce 2.5.

How they differ

Everything the original pygame offers is in pygame-ce, so code moves from pygame to pygame-ce with no changes. The other way is also fine as long as you do not use a pygame-ce addition.

Which should you install?

Install pygame-ce for new projects. It gets bug fixes and new Python versions sooner, and its additions save work: FRect stores positions as floats, so slow movement no longer gets lost to rounding (see Pygame Rect), and pygame.key.get_just_pressed() tells you which keys went down this frame.

Pick the original pygame only when a course, a book or a team asks for it. The skills are the same.

Installing and switching

The two packages both install a folder named pygame, so having both breaks the install. Keep exactly one:

python3 -m pip uninstall pygame pygame-ce
python3 -m pip install pygame-ce

How to install pygame covers the rest: checking the version, virtual environments and the common install errors.