Game Developer - May 2011

MARK DELOURA

One of the most remarkable changes in the game industry the past few years has been the massive growth of casual, mobile, and social games. A few years ago I gave a presentation at CoFesta in Tokyo lamenting how difficult it was for small independent developers to distribute and sell their games—that’s certainly not the case anymore! Now, it’s more difficult to decide which of the many, many platforms and marketplaces to create your game for, because there is so much opportunity for independent developers, especially on iOS and Facebook.

ENGINES FEATURED Blitz Games' Blitz Tech

Crytek's CryEngine

www.crytek.com/cryengine With such huge changes in the industry, it seemed like the perfect time to revisit the game engine survey. I was curious to see how the change in the game development ecosystem would be reflected in the distribution of survey responders, and the information they shared about their use of game engine middleware.

FIGURE 1
PLATFORMS
/ Traditional platforms/
PS3 ·························75.7%
Xbox 360 ················73.9%
Wii ··························· 20.0%
PC ···························66.1%
Mac ························· 14.8%
Linux ························· 3.5%
NGP ··························· 7.0%
PSP ··························· 6.1%
3DS ························· 10.4%
NDS···························· 7.0%

different than that of traditional
game developers, due to the
smaller size of games, shorter
production length, or need
for frequent updates. For the
purposes of this survey we will
refer to developers working on
larger-budget titles, those on
consoles and handhelds, as the
traditional developers, and we’ll
call those working on casual,
mobile, and social titles the
casual developers.

Survey Responders /// The developers I’ll concentrate on for most of this survey make traditional big-budget games. These games largely target the PC and high-end consoles (see Figure 1) as most large-budget titles are produced for the PC, PS3, and