GDC 2025 survey shows PC game development growing with lots interested in Valve's Steam Deck

The latest Game Developers Conference (GDC) survey has been released, and it gives a rather glowing overview of how great things are for PC gamers with lots of developers working on games.

With the survey including over 3,000 game developers and industry professionals, they've managed a decent enough sample size. What's really interesting though, is that PC game development is not just alive and well but expanding. As they said last year only "66% of developers reported that they were working on games for PC", but this year "that number climbed up to 80%".

Another interesting point here is that while the Steam Deck was not listed as an option, of those who picked "Other", the survey saw "44% of them wrote in Steam Deck as a platform they’re interested in".

Image credit: GDC

PC in this case means Windows specifically since Mac and Linux are separated. The industry still generally writes PC as meaning Windows. Maybe one day we'll break away from it. Update 8PM UTC: Image updated to their newer corrected version for some text.

Developers still don't seem all that keen on AI as well with "30% of respondents reported that they believe that generative AI is having a negative impact on the games industry, which is a 12% increase from last year". However, there's plenty that are using AI as GDC note: "More than half of developers surveyed (52%) work for companies that have implemented generative AI and one-third (36%) personally use them. Respondents within Business and Finance Roles in companies were most likely to use Artificial intelligence tools (51%), followed by Production and Team Leadership (41%) and Community, Marketing and PR (39%)".

Layoffs continue to hit hard too with "11% of developers reported being laid off in the past year".

Going by the results 4% of developers are using the free and open source Godot Engine for their current game, with the majority currently sticking to Unity and Unreal both at at 32%. 13% said they use other proprietary tools and then there's CryEngine at 0.2% and O3DE at 0.1%.

See more in the GDC Survey.