GDC 2019 survey shows increased dev interest in Switch and more
Each year, GDC publishes its “State of the Industry” report. The 2019 edition went live this week that details trends involving Switch and more. Nearly 4,000 developers participated this time around.
One of the questions asked was which platform(s) their last completed game released on. Here’s how the results panned out:
Xbox 360 – 3%
Xbox One X – 20%
PlayStation 3 – 2%
PlayStation 4 / Pro – 24%
Nintendo Switch – 9%
Smartphones / Tablets – 33%
Web browser – 9%
PC – 56%
Mac – 15%
Linux – 8%
VR Headsets – 12%
AR Headsets – 3%
Tabletop Games – 2%
Other – 8%
For the same question in last year’s survey, Switch only had 5%. That nearly doubled this year to 9%.
Next, developers responded in the following way when asked which platform(s) they are currently developing games for:
Xbox 360 – 2%
Xbox One X – 28%
PlayStation 4 / Pro – 31%
Nintendo Switch – 18%
Smartphones / Tablets – 38%
Web browser – 10%
PC – 66%
Mac – 20%
Linux – 10%
VR Headsets – 17%
AR Headsets – 7%
Voice Powered Games (Amazon Alexa, Google Home, etc.) – 2%
Tabletop Games – 4%
Other – 7%
Switch experienced the biggest year-over-year increase in dev interest, rising to 18% compared to 2018’s 12%. Also, 22% of developers polled said they expect their next game to be released on Nintendo’s console.
These were the results when developers were asked about the platform(s) that interests them the most right now:
Xbox 360 – 2%
Xbox One X – 28%
PlayStation 4 / Pro – 38%
Nintendo 3DS – 2%
Nintendo Switch – 45%
Smartphones / Tablets – 33%
Apple TV – 2%
Web browser – 10%
PC – 60%
Mac – 14%
Linux – 8%
VR Headsets – 27%
AR Headsets – 20%
Voice Powered Games (Amazon Alexa, Google Home, etc.) – 5%
Tabletop Games – 10%
Other – 5%
In 2018, 36% of developers said that Switch interested them the most. That rose to 45% this year.
Finally, nearly 1 in 4 devs saw their game perform best on Switch, compared to other consoles. Here’s the full insight from the report:
Switch sales have been greater than average – 24%
Switch sales have been average – 20%
Switch sales have been less than average – 12%
N/A. (I have only launched on Switch, or other issues.) – 43%
To get a sense of how well devs are doing on the Switch, we asked survey respondents whether they’d launched a game on Nintendo’s new console, and how it had performed on the Switch relative to other platforms.
The number of respondents who have launched a game on Switch is small (13 percent), though that’s still roughly double the 6 percent of respondents in last year’s survey who said they’d made a Switch game. This year 10 percent of respondents say they’re working on their first Switch game right now and 31 percent say they’re considering making a Switch game.
Among those who said they’d launched a game on Switch, the largest share (43 percent) said they couldn’t compare how their game had done on Switch compared to other platforms, either because they’d launched exclusively on Switch or for some other reason.
Nearly 1 in 4 (24 percent) of respondents who had launched a game on Switch said it had sold better on Nintendo’s new console than on other platforms, while 20 percent said their Switch sales were average and 12 percent said their game actually sold worse on Switch than other platforms. When we compare these results against last year’s survey, we see a small but significant uptick in the number of devs who say they’ve made or are making a game for Switch and the number of respondents who say they can’t compare their Switch sales against other platforms — perhaps signaling a recent rise in the number of devs making games exclusively for Nintendo’s new console.
