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5 Big Takeaways From The Newest Developer Survey On The State Of Gaming

5 Big Takeaways From The Newest Developer Survey On The State Of Gaming

Exploding interest in PC gaming was just one of the top trends

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Developers are on stage at the 2024 GDC game awards ceremondy.
Photo: GDC

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.

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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.”

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PC game development is leap frogging PS5 and Xbox Series X/S

PC game development is leap frogging PS5 and Xbox Series X/S

A screenshot shows the breakdown of what platforms developers are creating games for.
Screenshot: GDC

With 80 percent of respondents saying they’re currently working on a game that will hit PC, it’s the most popular platform to develop for by a country mile. That’s followed next by PS5 at a rate of 38 percent and Xbox Series X/S at 34 percent. (Games can come to multiple platforms, of course, hence the total here far exceeding 100 percent.) Developers were also surveyed about their upcoming projects, and that data shows the console numbers going just slightly down, with 37 percent of these upcoming projects targeting PS5 and 33 percent coming to Xbox Series X/S. Switch 2, meanwhile, is trending the other way, leaping from an 8-percent target rate for developers’ current projects to 20 percent for their next ones. Meanwhile, despite PlayStation edging out Xbox as a development target, when it comes to subscription services, Game Pass is still more popular to develop for than PS Plus. Thirteen percent of developers are working on games for Microsoft’s service while only nine percent are targeting Sony’s rival one.

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Interest in VR/AR is hanging around, at least for now

Interest in VR/AR is hanging around, at least for now

A chart shows developer interest in various VR/AR platforms.
Screenshot: GDC

It’s been a bad few years for VR, and AR glasses aren’t yet ready for prime time, at least not at prices regular people can afford. Still, even as Sony and Apple both reportedly halt production of their newest headsets due to weak demand, the survey reports that the number of developers working in VR/AR has stayed consistent at 35 percent. The Meta Quest and Steam VR are still the dominant platforms of interest for creators, with Apple VisionOS in a distant third. It’s still one percentage point higher than PS VR2, however.

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Developers are feeling as meh about live-service games as everyone else

Developers are feeling as meh about live-service games as everyone else

A pie chart shows sentiment about live-service games.
Screenshot: GDC

A third of blockbuster game developers say they’ve already worked on a live-service project at some point, and 41 percent of all developers say they wouldn’t want to work on one in the future. Interestingly, the number of players playing simultaneously (i.e. the Steam chart data everyone always throws around) was listed as the most important metric for an online multiplayer game’s success by 62 percent of developers. “I despise live-service games,” one respondent said. “They’re all destined to disappear someday. Who would want that? Games shouldn’t only exist as long as some old suits decide they’re profitable.”

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Companies are moving ahead with generative AI tools whether devs want to use them or not

Companies are moving ahead with generative AI tools whether devs want to use them or not

A graph shows how many people at game companies use AI tools.
Screenshot: GDC

While one in three developers is current using generative AI tools in one way or another, only nine percent said their company was mandating them. Between 2024 and 2025, however, negative attitudes toward the tech grew from 18 percent to 30 percent, while developers enthusiastic about generative AI shrunk from 21 percent to just 13 percent. Concerns cited ranged from ethics to layoffs, with over 50 percent sharing some sort of reservation, up from 42 percent a year ago.

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Almost everyone’s feeling the effects of layoffs

Almost everyone’s feeling the effects of layoffs

A graph shows how layoffs impact game developers.
Screenshot: GDC

One in 10 developers was laid off last year, according to the survey. Narrative, production, and art were the disciplines hit hardest. The number of people who weren’t concerned about layoffs at all went down from 34 percent to just 30 percent. The most common reasons game companies gave for the cuts? Restructuring (22 percent), declining sales (18 percent), and “market shifts” (15 percent). Almost one in five laid-off developers said no reason was ever even given.

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