Good news, people who want the Nintendo Switch 2 to actually have some new games you’ll be able to play on it relatively close to its arrival, with 8% of the developers quizzed as part of 2024’s GDC State of the Game Industry survey having said that they’re currently working on games aimed at the console.

With Nintendo’s next console being likely to emerge at some point in the not-so-distant future, following last year’s whole ‘has it been shown to some devs in a room at Gamescom or not’ thing, preparations are underway to make you actually want to buy it for reasons other than ports. There’s also plenty of interest in creating games for it from those who aren’t already.

As outlined in the survey’s findings, which can be found here if you fancy registering, 8% of the over 3000 developers who responded to it said that they’re currently developing a project aimed at the Nintendo Switch successor - the snappy working title that the console’s been slapped with until Nintendo decides to tell us what it’s actually called. That’s something in the region of 240 people who felt comfortable revealing that this is what they’re busy with.

Meanwhile 32% of the devs surveyed identified the Switch 2 as the platform that most interests them as a developer right now, meaning it’s only lagging behind PS5 (41%) and PC (62%) in that category. PC is also the platform that has the most devs making games for it right now at 66%, with PS5 and Xbox Series X/S sitting behind it at 35% and 34% respectively.

In much less upbeat news, a third of developers (35%) revealed that they’d been affected in some way by layoffs over the past twelve months, with 22% of those in QA having been laid off themselves. Surprise, surprise, the business and finance folks who took part in the survey reported the least number of layoffs in their sector.

Meanwhile, 56% of devs revealed that they’re concerned to some extent about their place of work possibly enacting layoffs of some kind over the next year. Most devs identified “post-pandemic course correction, studio conglomeration, and economic uncertainty” as the reasons they think more layoffs than usual are happening right now.

Unsurprisingly, this has led to more saying that they support unionisation and/or are opposed to the kinds of big acquisitions that we’ve seen over the past few years, the former especially so among younger devs.

Among the publishers and studios that enacted layoffs of some form towards the end of last year were Embracer Group, Team17, and Activision Blizzard.

Posted: Jan 24, 2024 10:38 pm
Related Forum: Gaming Discussion

Source: https://www.vg247.com/devs-are-working-on-nintendo-switch-2-games-gdc-survey