Planning ahead is the key to success. Developers in the gaming industry are well aware of that, so they are not waiting for the new generation consoles to be available on the market to start thinking about new games project to run on them. Games for the new consoles are already being developed, just like some NY online casinos are already being developed, although the relevant legislation has not been approved yet. But the future is upon us, so the Game Developers Conference polled nearly 4000 developers to find out what consoles they are preferring as the platform for their current and future projects.

More than 10 percent of respondents are currently making games for next-gen consoles. More precisely, 11 percent are already actively developing for Sony’s console, and a little less, 9 percent, are developing games for the Xbox Series X. When it comes to forecasts for the future, 23 percent of developers believe that their next game will be meant for the PS5 and 17 percent for the Xbox Series X. One further question concerned the general interest of developers for the new platforms and returned a 38 percent favour for the Playstation 5 and 25 percent for the new Xbox. A further 37 percent of responders declared their interest for Nintendo’s Switch.

These findings are part of the results of the eighth annual State of the Industry Survey, presenting the currents trends in the game industry ahead of the Game Developers Conference 2020 in March 16-20 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. The organizer is Informa Tech.

The survey also recorded that the majority of developers are still working on games for PC (56 percent) and/or mobile (39 percent). Interest for game streaming services on the other hand is still weak. Google Stadia for example is being targeted only by 6 percent of respondents, while a mere 3 percent are planning to stream their current project on xCloud.

The popularity of  Virtual Reality is increasing, with 25 percent of respondents believing that VR will be the dominant technology, up from 19 percent in the 2018 survey. Quite a few more developers (32 percent) are convinced that it is Augmented Reality that will dominate. A further 19 percent expect AR and VR to be equally important. The new wireless Oculus Quest VR headset seems to have become a game changer here, since most AR/VR developers are interested in it as the platform for their future games. The Quest collected 24 percent of the preferences, the Rift 20 percent and the HTC Vive 17 percent. A rather tall 32 percent of developers answered they are still undecided, though, confirming that preferences are still fluid. The Oculus Quest result is up 11 percent from the 2019 survey, while the Vive and Rift dropped 11 and 5 percent respectively. Clearly, the Oculus Quest is gaining traction as the most popular VR headset from the viewpoint of game developers.