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The GDC 2024 State of the Game Industry report asked over 3,000 workers in the game industry which platforms they are currently developing their projects for. Surprisingly, 18% of the devs surveyed are working on a Nintendo Switch project, while 8% are working on games for a “Nintendo Switch successor,” according to the survey.
The report, which can be downloaded here, also mentions the Switch successor in a question about the general platform interest. For this, 32% of them are looking forward to Nintendo’s new console.
It’s been almost seven years since the release of Nintendo’s hybrid console. As it stands, there’s still much we don’t know about a Switch 2. The company has yet to provide a teaser of when we could hear more news about it. An announcement could take place before the new financial year begins on April 1, culminating the Q1 period of 2024. If you saw the AI Shark news about the console releasing on September of this year, that was most likely a wild guess.
As we continue to wait for news on the upcoming console, the GDC 2024 report serves as a subtle, yet promising indication that at least some developers out there are already working on games for it. Of course, there’s no way of knowing if said devs are from Nintendo’s first-party studios or third-party ones. Nevertheless, it’s a good indication that things have been set in motion for some time.
Elsewhere in the report, there are more interesting results about the industry itself. One-third of developers have switched game engines in the past year or thought about doing so. Unity announcing it’d be introducing a fee pegged to game installs was definitely a factor.
In addition, almost half of the developers surveyed stated that Generative AI tools are being used in the workplace. The large majority of people using them are in the business and finance side of things, while quality assurance is the field on the lower end. Four out of five developers, however, are worried about the ethical use of AI.
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