The GDC 2025 State of the Game Industry report has arrived. Each year, GDC surveys several of its past attendees and the collates the results into a report.
These reports are designed to court pull-quotes and sometimes show shocking trends, such as this layoff slide, one of the few parts of this year’s survey that reflected what I seem to be seeing anecdotally.
But as some rightly note, the sample respondents and the data collection and collation methods make drawing any real conclusions from these data almost impossible.
Both of these threads are excellent–Laine Nooney’s in particular, who notes that “nearly 40% of respondents do not exist within the structural pressures and power relations of dominant employers.”
This would be like a “State of the Music Industry” report that took into account all bands picking up local coffeeshop gigs alongside what Atlantic Records is up to. Sure, you might glean some insights, but it’s probably not representative of the “industry” per se.
Meanwhile, I’m still thinking about Matthew Ball’s incredibly well-researched report “The State of Video Gaming in 2025” from last week, which anecdotally feels a lot more inline with the experiences of devs I know and better-reflects the actual conversations I hear from various people closer to funding sources than I am.
