It's kind of funny to look back on all the times PC gaming has been declared dead, a claim that—to borrow a phrase—was an exaggeration. Lest there be any doubt, GDC's 2025 State of the Game Industry report says development on the platform has "skyrocketed," with 80% of the more than 3,000 developers who responded to the survey saying they're currently making games for PC.
That's a big jump from the 2024 report, when 66% of respondents said they were developing for PC, which was sufficient for GDC to call it "the dominant platform." It's also more than double the percentage of developers working on the second-most popular platform, the PlayStation 5, which claimed 38% of respondents, and the Xbox Series X/S, which came in a close third at 34%
It's also worth noting that the GDC State of the Game Industry survey skews heavily toward Western developers. 58% of survey respondents are from the US, for instance, while the UK, Canada, and Australia make up another 16%. China, a massive market where mobile gaming is far more popular, doesn't rank among the list of countries with the most respondents—and even without taking that into account, the popularity of mobile gaming worldwide makes mobile game development feel underrepresented in the report. Japanese developers are also effectively absent. All of that is obviously going to bias the results to some extent.
Despite that limitation, it's great to see PC not just holding its own but actually growing as the dominant development platform for games. I just wish it was happening in an environment that wasn't quite so grim: The GDC survey also found that rummy best 1 in 10 respondents had been laid off in 2024, and 4% said their studios had been closed completely.
