state-of-game-development-survey-2009-10
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Industry survey shows iPhone growth, console development preference
Alright, alright, calm down -- before you break out the bottle of kerosene for a completely baseless flame war, we're going to point out that the following survey results are from a "comprehensive 55 question survey" of "more than 800 video game professionals from North America and beyond who read Gamasutra, subscribe to Game Developer magazine, or attend Game Developers Conference." We'd also like to note that the not-quite-recovered economy is likely playing a larger role than we can tell at the moment. All that said, the 2009/10 State of Game Development Survey shows that small development houses ("50 employees or fewer") have grown seven percent in the last year -- a statistic pretty much directly tied to the 25 percent of developers now working on "mobile platforms" (nearly 75 percent of which name the iPhone directly). We're hoping that, by this point in the post, any potential console warriors have moved on and won't notice us pointing out the breakdown of development percentage for each home console. Of the developers working on home consoles, 69 percent said they're developing for Xbox 360, while 61 percent claimed PlayStation 3. Maybe more interestingly, Wii console development dropped from 42 percent of respondents last year to 30 percent this year. Soft sales of third-party Wii titles last year likely didn't help to persuade devs to work with Nintendo. We'll see how that translates to the console's releases in the coming year.
