Eleven percent of game developers will be laid off by 2024, according to GDC survey

It’s a challenging time to be a developer these days, he said The 2025 State of the Gaming Industry from GDC report that surveyed more than 3,000 game developers and industry professionals. In one of the worst years of job losses in the game industry, 11 percent of developers said they would be let go from their positions in 2024 and 29 percent observed direct colleagues dismissed. All this is part of one unfortunate trend caused in part by consolidation which could see around 14,000 redundancies in 2024 when the final accounts are made.

Meanwhile, live service games seem to be here to stay, despite the spectacle flame of Concord and the axing of several Sony projects. A third of AAA developers said they are currently working on games as a service (GaaS), with 16 percent of the entire developer base working on such titles. This does not mean that everyone likes them, since 41 percent expressed that they are not interested in working on GaaS-style games. That aligns with a general malaise among gamers regarding live service titles.

An encouraging growing trend is in PC gaming, where 80 percent of developers said they were working on it — up massively from 66 percent last year. That could be due in part to Valve’s Steam platform, as 44 percent of developers said they were interested in working specifically on that platform. Browser games are also on the rise, with 16 percent of respondents working on versions. Finally, while game executives seem to love the potential of AI in gaming, developers hate it, with 30 percent saying it has a negative impact on the industry — up from 12 percent from the last year