Ahead of the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) in March, the organization behind the event released its latest annual survey of creators on the state of the industry. The feedback showed that gaming has been rocked by layoffs over the last 12 months, but also pointed to some silver linings for its growth and future heading into 2025.
This year is expected to be a massive one for gaming between the launch of Nintendo’s highly-anticipated new Switch 2 console and the long-awaited arrival of Grand Theft Auto VI, the sequel to the second-best-selling game ever made. But 2025 is also expected to be another year full of potential upheaval as the video game industry tries to figure its shit out amid both audience stagnation and record competition between the hundreds of high-quality new games released every month.
The 2025 GDC State of the Game Industry report, whose data was compiled from the responses of over 3,000 developers, showed game makers are still reeling from cuts across publishers and studios both big and small (NYU associate professor Laine Nooney discussed some of the limits of the data here). Eleven percent of respondents said they were laid off in 2025, with over 40 percent of developers feeling the immediate impact of those departures. They’re also feeling the effects of generative AI, with over 50 percent of respondents saying their companies use the tools and roughly one third saying they have personally used them to make games.
Live-service games are another area in which developers are increasingly skeptical. Amid major flops like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Concord, roughly one-third of developers at big-budget studios said they’re currently working on an online multiplayer game, but 41 percent of all developers said they’d rather be working on anything but a live-service project. That sentiment comes alongside conflicting signals from players, with Sony cutting even more live-service projects even as hero shooter Marvel Rivals explodes as one of the most successful new online games in years (for the time being, anyway).
One area for optimism? PC gaming. The 2025 GDC State of the Game Industry survey found that more developers than ever are planning their games for the open platform. The number of developers who said they’re working on a PC game grew from 66 percent in 2024 to 80 percent this year. The report speculates that this could be due in part to the popularity of Valve’s Steam Deck, which combines the convenience of a Nintendo Switch with the vast library of Steam games. (PC gaming has also grown by 20 percent since 2021 according to some estimates, even as console gaming has stalled.)
GDC, which runs March 17-21 this year, includes curated video game history installations, award shows, and talks in which developers share stories and insights from their experiences making hugely successful and/or historically significant games (GDC 2025 includes presentations on Astro Bot, Helldivers 2, and more). But it’s also a place where funding deals for new releases, from small indie games to bigger projects, get hatched. How to secure development funding while the industry is in flux is one of the big topics the conference plans to focus on this year.
“The lack of opportunities in the game industry spills into funding opportunities,” one anonymous developer said in the survey. “Unless you have something that will be live-service or the potential to be super viral, it’s not easy to find a publisher.”