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GDC Survey: PC is the preferred platform among developers, PS5 leads among consoles

Samiya

Samiya

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PC Gamer has an article on the PC sides of things - respondents were primarily from the US and EU with Asia accounting for 8% of the responses:
www.pcgamer.com

The PC is the favored platform among game devs in the US and Europe

GDC's annual poll of game devs shows a strong and rising interest in PC as a platform.
www.pcgamer.com www.pcgamer.com

Here are the survey results from the GDC State of the Industry report

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Katana_Strikes

Katana_Strikes

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Oct 29, 2017
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There's some interesting info in there like Covid impact and money earned from platforms/ideal cut etc. Interesting read.
 
dude

dude

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The only surprise is how low the mobile (iOS/GP) numbers are, especially when compared to the "what platform was your previous game released on" question.
 
pswii60

pswii60

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Oct 27, 2017
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PC dominating in the revenue too. I guess this is because many of the responses will be from indie devs who only have their games on Steam etc.
 
Pankratous

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Oct 26, 2017
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I don't understand why xCloud and PlayStation Now are options. Those don't exist without PlayStation and Xbox. They aren't separate development platforms.
 
modiz

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Probably a good idea to just make this into a general thread, theres a lot of interesting topics in the survey like Covid impact, crunch, platforms, subscription services, diversity and so on.
Heres a link to the results (the report is free anyawy so I hope that there is no issue with a direct link here, if there is I can remove it):

Seems that developers are pretty excited for developing on PS5.
 
.exe

.exe

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Oct 25, 2017
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Well it seems like it's the most profitable platform for many of them based on that last poll, so I can see why.

Also, the results of that poll for Switch makes it seem like those early success stories are perhaps not as applicable today.
 
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plow

plow

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Oct 28, 2017
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I Imagine the Series S could be tanking the Series X a bit in this case, since they are packed together.
 
elenarie

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Pankratous said:
I don't understand why xCloud and PlayStation Now are options. Those don't exist without PlayStation and Xbox. They aren't separate development platforms.
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You have to take these things into account if you want to make your game play better on them. Doing considerations around UX when taking into account the existence of touch controls, or how latency would impact the core gameplay experience... can think of many reasons why you would want to consider these as platforms.
 
ThreepQuest64

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The revenue chart is very interesting. Really shows how big the PC only game catalogue is but at the same time that many PC games seem to exist on other platforms as well and doing well.
 
NewDust

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elenarie said:
You have to take these things into account if you want to make your game play better on them. Doing considerations around UX when taking into account the existence of touch controls, or how latency would impact the core gameplay experience... can think of many reasons why you would want to consider these as platforms.
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This would already be a necessity on the main platforms with remote play, not?
 
DuvalDevil

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plow said:
I Imagine the Series S could be tanking the Series X a bit in this case, since they are packed together.
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That's certainly the case. I don't think that devs are particular excited to develop for the S. With that in mind, I thought that Xbox numbers would be lower. Great to see!
 
Principate

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Oct 31, 2017
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PS5 is a beast as always. I'm honestly surprised the switch is that high, pretty massive turnaround.
 
Prine

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plow said:
I Imagine the Series S could be tanking the Series X a bit in this case, since they are packed together.
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Lol what? Nothing suggests that. This in reference to Dev environments, GDK encompasses Xbox and PC, with GDK being new and therefore more difficult to grasp then others ATM (based on DF comments about this).
 
OP
OP
Samiya

Samiya

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modiz said:
Probably a good idea to just make this into a general thread, theres a lot of interesting topics in the survey like Covid impact, crunch, platforms, subscription services, diversity and so on.
Heres a link to the results (the report is free anyawy so I hope that there is no issue with a direct link here, if there is I can remove it):
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I thought about it, but I think it's better to have a separate thread on each of the topics - impact of covid, crunch, gender diversity, subscription services, etc, right? I made one about the unionization thing that includes crunch and loss of veterans

Sidewinder said:
;(

I hope it'll rise again once PSVR2 is on the horizon and MS brings VR to the Xbox one day.
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Well, 38 percent is still a significant portion and the survey didn't include PSVR2 apparently
 
Mass_Pincup

Mass_Pincup

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Looks like the Switch is slightly worse for devs than PlayStation and Xbox.

Interesting data all around.
 
Spark

Spark

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Dec 6, 2017
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Not hard to see why. Pretty much everything sans Nintendo and most of Sony's (for now) first party output is on PC. It's the biggest middle ground platform that any developer can target.
 
gofreak

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Pryme said:
Maybe in the 'interest' column, but for the 'developing' survey, there's no reason why that would be the case.
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A sign of good engagement from Sony, perhaps, as well as market forces.

I recall WSJ reporting early in the next-gen rumour cycle that Sony was deprioritising small and mid-size developers in favour of large publishers with PS5, but looking at this, that doesn't seem to be the case at all. At least I can only surmise that the bulk of the difference between PS and Xbox for current/next project release planning is among smaller devs rather than the big guys.
 
Pryme

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gofreak said:
A sign of good engagement from Sony, perhaps, as well as market forces.

I recall WSJ reporting early in the next-gen rumour cycle that Sony was deprioritising small and mid-size developers in favour of large publishers with PS5, but looking at this, that doesn't seem to be the case at all. At least I can only surmise that the bulk of the difference between PS and Xbox for current/next project release planning is among smaller devs rather than the big guys.
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I think it's not nearly as complex as you paint it. There are regions in Asia and Europe where Xbox is borderline non-existent. I certainly expect interest in development for PlayStation consoles to be significantly higher for developers from those regions.
 
Zaimokuza

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Are we sure this sample is representative of the industry? That Mac percentage in the second slide looks incredibly suspicious
 
gofreak

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Pryme said:
I think it's not nearly as complex as you paint it. There are regions in Asia and Europe where Xbox is borderline non-existent. I certainly expect interest in development for PlayStation consoles to be significantly higher for developers from those regions.
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Indeed. Though if that explains the difference, I think it still also runs contrary to some of the reporting and concern around Sony's approach to developers with PS5. If it's the case that they're still engaged with and facilitating interest from region specific devs then that's also a good sign that interest from sony in large publisher deals with global impact hasn't been quite as detrimental to engagement with other types of dev as was once feared. At least if this survey is anything to go by.
 
Henrar

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Zaimokuza said:
Are we sure this sample is representative of the industry? That Mac percentage in the second slide looks incredibly suspicious
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Mac has a huge indie scene, at least from my experience here in Europe. It's not main platform, but a lot of studios consider Mac ports of their games, especially if they run on an engine than already support macOS. And Arcade seems to have boosted interest.
 
modiz

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Zaimokuza said:
Are we sure this sample is representative of the industry? That Mac percentage in the second slide looks incredibly suspicious
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this sample is based mostly on independent developers/small studios, only around a 1/3 are what you would usually consider to be working at a AAA studio. Its probably not representative of what you would perceive the game industry to be.
 
Pyro

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Makes sense given the full breadth of games like Early Access (on Xbox for a while now but still not nearly as many as something like Steam), F2P, and small indies that release not just on Steam but itch.io and the like.
 
Zaimokuza

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Henrar said:
Mac has a huge indie scene, at least from my experience here in Europe. It's not main platform, but a lot of studios consider Mac ports of their games, especially if they run on an engine than already support macOS. And Arcade seems to have boosted interest.
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modiz said:
this sample is based mostly on independent developers/small studios, only around a 1/3 are what you would usually consider to be working at a AAA studio. Its probably not representative of what you would perceive the game industry to be.
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I was under the impressio that AAA games tipically don't release on macos and that the main platforms for indies were windows and switch. Is Macos that popular?
 
ShinUltramanJ

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Really surprised that Xbox lags behind the others. Especially with the constant Game Pass praise, you'd more developers would want to be part of it.

Glad to see PC at the top.
 
sredgrin

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Zaimokuza said:
I was under the impressio that AAA games tipically don't release on macos and that the main platforms for indies were windows and switch. Is Macos that popular?
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12 percent isn't that huge. It's 1 above tabletop games.

I also wouldn't doubt if the answer was getting conflated with ios as well
 
plow

plow

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Oct 28, 2017
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Prine said:
Lol what? Nothing suggests that. This in reference to Dev environments, GDK encompasses Xbox and PC, with GDK being new and therefore more difficult to grasp then others ATM (based on DF comments about this).
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I don't think it's crazy to think, that if the Series X wouldn't have been packed together with the Series S, that the percentage in the "Interest" part would have been higher. It's a far more capabale machine.

Pryme said:
Maybe in the 'interest' column, but for the 'developing' survey, there's no reason why that would be the case.
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Yeah i was talking only about the part that's in the Thread title
 
Kyougar

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ShinUltramanJ said:
Really surprised that Xbox lags behind the others. Especially with the constant Game Pass praise, you'd more developers would want to be part of it.

Glad to see PC at the top.
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Gamepass, the same as EGS moneyhats, is a "successful get more success", "rich get richer" situation. To get a moneyhat from Epic, or get a Gamepass deal, you have to be somewhat successful in the first place. 99.9% of devs will never get on EGS or Gamepass. Only AFTER they had a surprise smash hit on Steam.


On another note:
Where eastern Europeans among the surveys? It would probably skew it further to PC. And if they had included Asian developers (even with Japanese devs, but I think some Japanese devs/divisions were surveyed here) Mobile and PC would have smashed the competition, with mobile probably even eking out PC.
 
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