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State of the Game Industry 2018 Results

Posted by Matt Birchler
— 2 min read

The Game Developer Conference does a survey of thousands of game developers every year and I always find it interesting as a way to get a pulse on the industry overall. You can get the report yourself here, but I’ve picked out some of the highlights below.

60% of devs are currently working on a PC game, more than any other platform, with smartphones/Tablets (36%), PlayStation 4 (30%), and Xbox (26%) in distant runner up spots. Also notable, 20% are on a game coming to Mac, 19% are doing a VR game, 7% are doing AR, and a measly 2% are doing Apple TV.

The most notable stat here was last year only 5% of respondents were interested in working on the Switch. This year 36% marked it as one of the platforms they’re most interested in working on.

When asked about the Switch’s ability to connect with consumers, 46% called it the “right product at the right time”, 39% said maybe, and a bizarre segment of 2% said “No; people are just not that interested in its core premise.” What?

As a gimme, they asked whether the Switch will outsell the Wii U, 73% said it would, 22% said maybe, and 5% said no way. For the record, Switch sold 10 million units in 9 months. The Wii U sold 13 million units in 5 years. Yeah, the Switch is going to pass the Wii U.

In the most encouraging news yet, games seem to be selling well on the Switch, even if they are not made by Nintendo. The PS4 has over 70 million sales and the Xbox One is over 35 million. Despite the Switch’s (currently) lower customer base, those customers seem to be buying games in droves.

When asked about VR and AR, there seemed to be waning interest. They saw a small drop in enthusiasm, and also found fewer people expected their next games would be on a VR or AR platform.

Finally, it was surprising to see more people respond that they were working on Android titles than iOS at the moment (53% vs 49%). I have not seen this pan out into prominent games coming to Android over iOS, which makes this result the most surprising to me personally.

If this was interesting to you and you want to learn more, download the report here. They do ask for your email address and name/job info before letting you download it, so I figured I’d save you the hassle and share some of the best stuff.