Game Dev

Game Dev predictions for 2025

A panel of industry analysts has made their predictions for 2025. Switch 2, GTA 6, Live Service Games, AI, and more.

GTA 6 is the main one, everyone expects the game to be absolutely massive and give the entire industry a boost. I have no doubt it will be huge but not sure it will hit GTA 5 levels, that game has sold over 150 MILLION copies! That's insane!

The Switch 2 may struggle in 2025. The original Switch was pretty revolutionary, so if a Switch 2 is exactly the same but with more power is that going to be enough for people to pick one up? I will definitely be grabbing one to finally finish Tears of the Kingdom at a nice 60 fps.

Fortnite will continue morphing into more of a platform than a game. Analysts predict more UGC, move events, and more competition against Steam / PS Store / App Store.

Xbox will go all-in on PS5. This will be an interesting one, they are definitely pushing towards having their games on everything and just promoting Game Pass.

Instant gaming will go huge. I wonder if this one will become true, I don't know much about this market but I do know Unity is pretty well positioned for it since they have been upgrading all their mobile Web tools lately.

Ads revenue will be more prominent on PC and Consoles. I hope this does not become true but fear it might, or at least some publishers will definitely attempt to add them, players will obviously react negatively but sadly the net result might still be positive in favor of ads. At least we will always have indie games!

The post also goes over their 2024 predictions and breaks down which ones were correct or incorrect, fun stuff!

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Game Dev

Make games for PROFIT or FUN?

Recently I made an interesting video on a great strategy you can follow if your goal is to make money with your games.

I wrote a post on Twitter and it ended up pretty lengthy.

As a game developer, what do you prefer?

- Chasing your passion project?

- Doing what has best odds for financial success?

This is a very important question. Both options are perfectly valid, but do make sure you ask yourself that question so you know what you're working towards.

One example of a studio following this strategy is Two Point Studios. They were formed to make management games in the style of the old Bullfrog games (Theme Hospital, Populous, Dungeon Keeper)

They have published Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus. Right now they are working on Two Point Museum.

By making multiple games in the same genre they end up gathering an audience so every new game they make starts from a higher baseline. Two Point Museum got 30k wishlists on day one!

And by doing that you also gain more knowledge of the genre while building up your own tools for that specific genre which will allow you to be extremely efficient.

So if you want to make games for money then this strategy is great.

But do ask yourself the original question so you know what goal you're working towards.

Tech

Valve prints more money than Apple!

Valve might not have the same total size and name recognition as Apple, Google, Netflix, but they are absolutely massive on a per employee basis.

Steam just prints money and it's a relatively small company with only 400 people, smaller than Larian! (Baldur's Gate 3) And much smaller than companies like Activision Blizzard (13,000) and Ubisoft (18,000)

They are a private company so not much is known about them, but due to a current lawsuit where they have to publish some numbers there is some information around.

The actual number isn't revealed, but a chart shows it on top with Facebook at number 2 with $780,000 net income per employee. These are also based on 2018 numbers, so the current value is likely insanely higher given how much Steam (and Steam Deck) has grown in the past few years.

Gaming

I predict this game will find HUGE success!

Okay so maybe I overhyped the title a bit just because this game hits all my buttons.

The game is called Meatshot, it's a game inspired by The Matrix (love it!), Max Payne (one of my favorite games, epic coolness factor) and Prototype 2! (one of the best power fantasy games, sadly there hasn't been a new one in ages)

This is absolutely the kind of game that goes crazy viral with Gifs, 850 upvotes on Reddit which is pretty huge.

Right now it has about 3,000 wishlists which it got mainly just based off this one post in a handful of days. If the dev continues posting gifs regularly then I have no doubt this will have 20k+ wishlists by release. Also it's made with Unity!