In the vast universe of game development, professionals that are well paid and enthusiasts that are powered by the pure love of gaming, co-exist to push the industry to move forward.
The global game industry revenue settled at $180 billion in 2021, expected to double by 2027. In 2021, gamers spent 38 billion hours on Steam, or 4.3 million years equivalent. Steam has over 27 million concurrent users at its ATH, and 130 million monthly active users.
In the post-pandemic era, gaming and virtual lifestyles are taking over. Steam with a 27% growth rate in 2021 made a very strong statement.
We are here to share some insights of game developers and the industry in general, as we have done some interesting interviews with our verified developers on Steam.
Probably not like what you imagined, many game developers are part-time. They design amazing games in their spare time, while trying to move closer to the game design industry.
"My studio is a studio of two enthusiasts - ShiboGames. In our spare time from work and other things, we create games. At the moment, there is not a single project in development, so far only support for already implemented games is in the plans."
From: Vladislav
We also have professionals who verified with us. They are full-time game developers and studios.
"We're an aspiring game development studio, working with Unreal Engine since 2016. We're most experienced in gameplay programming, procedural generation, AI development, and randomized systems."
From: Norlin Games Studio
Just like our first-gen gamers, our dev interviewees also have deep bounded origins with games that can be traced back to their early stages of life.
"Oh personally, the first game was probably an arkanoid clone during school years, it was made with Basic language for the DOS platform lol. I was 15 or so."
From: Norlin Games Studio
"The first game was: Emberzone, I was 19 years old, it was made on the Unreal 4 engine. It was a test demo project in order to understand how the engine works. The game was made in about 5-7 days."
From: Vladislav
Then it comes to the necessary question, "what are your favorite game studios and their masterpieces?"
"I'd say it's Arkane Studios and their Prey game which is in my personal top-3 list of the games ever."
From: Norlin Games Studio
"Hideo Kojima and his Death's Standing."
From: Vladislav
There are many fields in the game dev sector, which form different types of games in the market. From UE4-based projects to Augmented Reality, let us take a look at what our dev can offer us in the future.
"I am now committed to creating games in the world of Web3 I am a creator who is good at many fields (VR, AR, games, somatosensory, gesture, motion capture, holography, etc.)"
From: ZBM Team
"A lot of experience with extending Engine's capabilities allows us to solve a whole range of different tasks, such as implementing new features to the UE4 editor, adding new tools, custom graph editors, UE4 plugins, project-specific QoL improvements and even customizing the UE4 source code if that's required."
From: Norlin Games Studio
We believe we have infinite possibilities down the road.
Dev difficulties and challenging issues are inevitable. Therefore, we asked our interviewees to recall their challenging moments. It turned out to be quite the same.
"If talking specifically about game design, and not game development in general, the most complex part is transforming a raw idea to a playable set of mechanics."
From: Norlin Games Studio
"There are many ideas, but there is not enough time to express and make them."
From: ZBM Team
Turning the cascading ideas into rational designs and workflows could be very difficult and time-consuming. Then it draws another question: "what is the best eureka moment?"
"This one is tough, probably the mere fact that I can do games."
From: Norlin Games Studio
"Unreal Engine was my Eureka."
From Vladislav
P12 is always wide-open to any ideas and suggestions. At the end of the interview, we asked our dev friends to offer some wild feature requests that we might be able to deliver in the future. Some very interesting answers were given.
"Oh I have one! Please provide a way to generate a planet-scale procedural persistent world filled with environment assets on top of a distributed scalable backend solution allowing to play thousands and millions of concurrent players in the same world."
From: Norlin Games Studio
"P12 can add extended functions. If community developers create some plug-in modules for use, it will have a very broad prospect for p12."
From: ZBM Team
Moving down the road, P12 will maintain a deep-bound relationship with our verified dev members and thrive to provide the best gaming platform in Web3.
Together, we shall conquer the impossibility.