The future is looking mighty bright fellow PC gamers.
In 2014 GDC’s developer survey pegged the number of developers releasing their games on PC at over 52% vs 20% for PS4 and 17% for Xbox One.
Well, the European game dev conference wrapped up and a similar poll puts the number of devs releasing their games on PC at 58%, with 18% releasing on PS4 and 13% on Xbox one.
Here’s hoping a lot of these games turn out to be really good
It’s pretty amazing to me that the only platform NOT running TV commercials 24/7 is the one with the most developer interest.
It makes sense - the biggest potential player base is on the platform that doesn’t need to advertise. There literally aren’t enough Xbox Ones in the world to match the big PC games in numbers - there’s a good chance there are more people playing a game of League of Legends right now than there are Xbox Ones.
I suppose you don’t see commercials for PCs as a gaming platform. You definitely see commercials from different PC manufacturers and from Microsoft (for Windows).
Anyway, without knowing the developers involved, it’s hard to get excited. And I say this as a PC gamer. But another fifty retro-platformers from basement indie developers or whatever isn’t what interests me.
Stuff like that does interest me, but I think it’s telling that Kinthalis 1) didn’t include smartphone/tablet numbers and 2) thinks that raw counting numbers mean anything.
Are the numbers that surprising, considering the number of hoops somebody has to jump through in order to be allowed to develop a game for XBox 1 / PS4, whereas pretty much anyone with a compiler can develop for PC?
Also, do the “PC” numbers include Facebook or other online/Flash/HTML5 games?
Do we care about tablet games? Consoles and PC is all I care about personally. And those numbers are a bit lower for tablets from PC, about 2 to 5 percentage points.
So the fact that a significant majority of developers are looking to release their games on PC doesn’t mean anything?
Nah, I just like the complete picture. And seriously, raw numbers don’t mean anything. The PC is the easiest platform to develop for as there is no outside group restricting access to the development environment and anyone can call themselves a PC developer even if all they’ve got in a copy of RPG Maker and a dream.
It’s possible, certainly that this includes Facebook/Flash developers… but how many of them are going to go to a games developer’s talk where most of the lectures are things like:
Advanced visual effects with DX 11
Physics Math of game programming
Narrative fundamentals
Technical artist bootcamp
And if there ARE browser games being showcased at those events, no one talks about them. The only games I hear about from GDC and the like are PC games, indie games, console games, and the occasional iphone game, so I don’t think GDC is really the place to showcase browser games, unless you got something really special, like Card Hunter!
Not surprising AT ALL. GDC self selects here - smartphone and tablet developers don’t go. There’s no point.
Actually, it probably self selects somewhat in favor of the PC overall also.
Not actually sure why this needed to be posted at all, other than Kinthalis fanboying again though. Hooray, there will be lots of games for the PC according to a survey?
You don’t think it’s significant that the two largest game developer conferences in the world have a majority of developers making PC titles?
It certainly seemed significant to several game news outlets.
As a second thought, maybe you can just skip threads about PC gaming, if they bother you so much.
And yes, this means we’re likely to see a plethora of PC games coming out, in spite of new consoles arriving, which I’m sure some people were worried about. Usually attention starts to go towards new consoles, but it seems that’s just not true.
It doesn’t surprise me, but the huge discrepancy does. Almost no developers are PC-exclusive anymore just like almost no developers are console-exclusive anymore. Honestly, it really does look like someone took all the bedroom hobbyist coders and RPG Maker fans and lumped them all in with “PC developers.” Of course that number will be bigger.
I’m sure it’s the RPG Maker guys are going to conferences like this, to hear the likes of John Carmack talk about the new version of RPG maker, now with real-time global illumination!
Well, it makes no sense in a world with three popular platforms to isolate your game into a single one. Specially not huge 50 million dollar titles, not unless you are essentially being funded by a platform holder. It’s just not good business sense. You stand to make more money and grow an IP faster by going multi-plat than by sticking with a single platform.
Smaller titles, on PC specially do work. I can’t think of a major publisher that doesn’t have at least one PC exclusive Franchise. Ubisoft has a few, EA has a couple of big ones, Activision/Blizzard of course, Valve… even medium publishers outside Japan do too.
I know you keep joking about this, but I know some people who regularly go to GDC and they’re all hobbyist coders. Of course they’re PC (and not console) developers. And they absolutely do skew the numbers.
Yeah, no. I’ll thank you to stop assigning motives to my threads. I didn’t post it to “Take a swipe” at… who exactly? Justin? Most people on here are PC gamers.
I read the news article and I thought it would be cool to share. I was hoping people would discuss the possibilities, or the games coming out of the conferences, but instead Justin and Airk have to start derailing as usual.
