Game studios deal with uncertainty by doing more with less | Unity

Unity said in its annual report that game developers faced with uncertainty are doing more with less resources.

The last few years have been a difficult time in game development, said Unity, maker of the Unity 6 game engine. The industry is still massive, with over three billion global active players. Games grossed over $184 billion in 2024, easily out-earning TV and movies. Yet there’s a grimmer set of numbers, too, the tallies of layoffs, studio closures, and canceled projects that index deep challenges facing the industry.

For studios, success lies on a razor’s edge: be bold enough to capture players’ hearts and minds while staying safe to reduce your risk, Unity said. Game devs need to harness innovative tech to save time, but they can’t waste effort exploring new tools and workflows they won’t use.

They need to grow the team enough to tap into specialized expertise for gorgeous graphics, complex gameplay mechanics, and tricky networking setups, but be lean enough to limit your exposure. And they need to stay independent so they don’t have to rely on outside support or funding, but go big or risk being ignored by the market.

Last year’s 2024 Unity Gaming Report zoomed in on this tension, highlighting how games overall are having a greater cultural impact than ever but are still individually insecure. This year, Unity sees the same market forces in play, but studios’ tactics are starting to evolve. To capture these emergent trends on the ground, Unity has shifted research to embrace more data that reflects how the gaming industry is dealing with this volatility and the strategies being deployed right now to survive and even thrive in this climate.

The question of the moment becomes: How are game developers planning for success? What are the options studios are weighing, and how can your team benefit from their insights?

This report draws on numerous polls and surveys conducted by third-party agencies and by the Unity team at major industry events such as GDC and Gamescom in 2024, alongside unique data from nearly nearly five million Unity Engine developers.

Trends shaping game development in 2025

Trend No. 1: Devs are managing risk by reducing costs.

Studios are facing uncertainty by doing more with less. That can mean stretching resources with innovative tech, refusing to take on debt to limit exposure, investing in live ops, or keeping the team lean – but over 60% of devs say their main strategy in the current industry climate is to squeeze more value out of each game they build.

Almost 70% of the devs we surveyed said they try to do more with less. And 45% said they’re harnessing efficiency tools to increase productivity, while 24% are squeezing more ROI out of their monetization and live ops budgets. 

A fifth of the studios Unity spoke to reported staying lean to limit their exposure, using strategies like avoiding overhiring (10%) or refusing to take on debt (6%), while 4% said they’re intentionally limiting growth to reduce their vulnerability.

[Source: CintTM survey 2024, 300 respondents]

Trend No. 2: Studios are experimenting with different multiplayer setups.

Devs are still very interested in building networked multiplayer experiences – 64% say they’re currently working on multiplayer or couch co-op games. This year, many studios also report exploring new media, formats, and features in their multiplayer games.

Multiplayer games still eclipse other setups – 64% of devs report that they’re working on projects with multiplayer features (including couch co-ops), while another 32% are networked single-player games.

Trend No. 3: Devs are sticking with trusted platforms.

Taking games to as many platforms as possible is still a popular strategy to extend a title’s reach and ROI, but studios are cautious about bringing their games to new venues. While 90% of devs launched their most recent games on mobile (with desktop not far behind at 80%), web and social media games are just starting to gain traction as gaming platforms, with 11% combined.

This year’s data bears witness to a bit of a shift – devs are still going multiplatform to stretch the value of their hard work, but they’re doing so cautiously. We see a bit of a lag in capitalizing on the promise of fast-to-port, easy-to-install web, with just 11% of devs saying they plan to release on this promising format, whereas mobile numbers remain high, suggesting that the mobile live game market is still going strong.

Mobile is popular with studios of all kinds. 90% of devs polled say they launched their games on mobile, and this rate is fairly steady across studio sizes.

Console launch rates rise alongside team size: Just 19% of studios with fewer than 10 team members target these platforms, compared to 84% of enterprise studios with 300+ staff.

Trend No. 4: Games are getting bigger.

The video game market is competitive, and building big games – whether they’re beefed up by expansive worlds, lots of levels, or non-stop updates – offers a clear-cut way to communicate a game’s value to players. And it’s working – 88% of devs say that overall, play times are on the rise in their games.

The median build size of made with Unity games has been steadily increasing. While the median game was only slightly over 100 MB in 2022, that figure’s grown by nearly 67% in just two years.

Developers working on large-scale games (open world, sandbox, or with large levels) say they’re targeting PC and console platforms, suggesting they may not perceive mobile or web as realistic platforms for large-scale games. 

Open world is the most popular style of large-scale game environment across platforms, but it’s worth noting that sandbox games make up an impressive 20% of large-scale games on PC for the devs Unity talked to at Gamescom last year. 

Trend No. 5: Devs are looking to tech to keep projects on track.

The survey found 96% of the studios Unity talked to are integrating AI tools into their workflows, but machine learning hasn’t unleashed the full-scale revolution that so many in the industry thought was coming. Instead, devs are making calculated choices to find tech solutions for day-to-day problems, with less than half of devs using AI tools in any one workflow.

While headlines about the economy of the gaming industry are often stark, devs say their main challenges are coming from inside the house: Internal organizational issues far outweigh external factors as chief concerns among the devs we surveyed. 

About 21% identified long lag times exploring tech as the biggest blocker – a cruel irony of trying to stay ahead of the curve is that you can waste a lot of time trying to find it, and long R&D times testing out new tech can be a huge drain on devs’ most precious resource: time. Another 20% pointed to hurdles keeping projects in scope and on time. Meanwhile, difficulties funding and marketing games hovered near 5-6% each, while finding a unique game concept landed a bit higher, with 18% of devs naming this as a primary obstacle. 

Conclusion

Last year’s report showed how studios dealt with economic headwinds by squeezing more value out of their work. The trends indexed developer strategies like adopting AI tools to save time, diversifying revenue strategies, shipping games to more platforms, prioritizing multiplayer games, and building stronger brands to extend players’ engagement and loyalty. With this blueprint, devs aimed to stretch resources and maximize their ROI by finding new ways to save time and increase their games’ reach.

This year, many of the same market forces are in play, but studios’ responses to them have shifted slightly. As deep cuts, layoffs, and studio closures continue, the developers we spoke to seem to be putting safety first with strategies that limit their exposure to risk: they’re staying small and nimble; diversifying the types of multiplayer game they build; prioritizing trusted platforms; bringing players bigger worlds and more content; and they’re turning to time-saving tools – but cautiously.

These five trends offer a snapshot of what studios are approaching their work in 2025 – but of course good plans need to be forward-looking. So what comes next?

Devs forecast that live service games will continue to grow in popularity. 42% of the devs surveyed said they thought more games would adopt the continuous update model as a competitive strategy, while12% pointed to the potential for more web, web for mobile, and web GPU games.

Echoing the first trend from this year’s report, 17% of these devs predict a rise in solo and small studios, even though only a sliver of respondents (1%) anticipate that the gaming industry will continue to contract and consolidate. Just 6% said they foresee signs of growth this year.

About the data

The data in this report is drawn from the Unity Engine and portfolio of service products, including games made with Unity that are sending events through the platform. These solutions span mobile, PC, XR, web, social, and console gaming to provide a unique high-level overview of video game development trends.

Additional data for this report comes from a CintTM CATI (computer-assisted telephone interview) survey of 300 game developers with a margin of error of +/-5.66% at a 95% confidence level. Additionally, we include data from two in-person surveys conducted at industry events. Unity employees conducted interviews with 144 randomly selected studios March 18–22, 2024 onsite at GDC in San Francisco, USA and with 231 randomly selected studios August 21–24, 2024 at Gamescom in Leipzig, Germany.