Every year, the GDC (Game Developers Conference) takes the opportunity to survey video game professionals. For the occasion, 3000 developers from different backgrounds respond to a survey to determine the state of the industry, and their position in it. Thus, 11% of respondents indicated having been made redundant over the last 12 months: a figure up from 7% last year. Furthermore, 41% of respondents indicate having been directly impacted by layoffs: 29% of respondents know of a colleague who lost a position (17% last year), while 18% indicate that colleagues in other divisions have been made redundant (compared to 11% last year). Finally, 4% of respondents indicated that the studio they worked at had simply gone out of business. Among the reasons mainly given by companies for these layoffs, three stand out: restructuring (22%), declining turnover (18%) and an overall industry trend (15%).
The GDC survey also allows us to get a better idea of the state of the industry as a whole: 33% of developers originally dedicated to the design of triple A games have announced that they are currently working on a live service game. . This is a lot (a third of them, in reality), especially since there is no real appetite for this type of production among them: if 16% of the total respondents indicated that they were already working and already on a live service game, only 13% of respondents indicated that they were interested in working on a game of this type, while 42% mentioned the opposite, and absolutely did not wish to work on a live service game. Finally, 29% indicated that they did not really know.
At the same time, the PC is increasingly gaining ground among the platforms favored by developers: thus, 80% of the professionals surveyed indicated that they were working on a PC game (compared to 66% last year), while only 8% of respondents said indicated working on a game for Nintendo Switch 2 (the same figure as last year). At the same time, 38% are working on a PS5 game, 34% on an Xbox Series X/S game, 29% on an Android game, 28% on an iOS game, 23% on a Mac game and 20% on a Nintendo Switch game .
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