Ahead of this year’s conference in March, the GDC have released their annual State of the Industry Survey. This year, it seems, developers are keen on making VR-compitable games. And PCs are still the top platform to work on. Obviously.
There’s good reason for this – I’ll leave our list of the best PC games here and let you figure out what that is. Hey, I’m sure you already know.
Right, numbers and figures incoming. Deep breath.
The report shows that last year, seven percent of the developers surveyed were working on VR games, whereas that number has jumped to 16 percent in 2016. Furthermore, 15 percent of devs suggest they’ll incorporate VR into their next games, while that figure stood at just six percent twelve months ago.
When asked if VR and augmented reality was a “sustainable business”, a resounding 75 percent of devs agreed, however 27 percent don’t feel adoption rates will match or exceed the current console install-base. Just one percent of those asked expect it to happen by 2018 (which was the earliest time slot available for selection), 44 percent reckon it’ll happen by 2026, and 54 percent think it will happen by 2030.
This is an interesting stat, this one: 38 percent of those asked predict VR/augmented reality hardware will be in ten percent of US households by 2020. This jumps way up to 86 percent for 2030; while just nine percent think it’ll never happen at all. Thumbs down to the pessimists.
Although down by four percent year-on-year, 52% of those developers asked are working on PC games, which might make it less of a surprise that the Oculus Rift is considered the most popular platform among VR developers.
On the eSports front – 88 percent of developers now think the competitive games industry is a “sustainable long-term business”, a figure that’s up nine percent since last year’s report.
Phew, that’s a lot of numbers and a whole lot to chew on. Of course, the GDC report is but a focussed study, but what do you make of its findings?