Introduction

As the largest professional association for game developers worldwide, the International Game Developers Association has been in a unique position to know and understand individual game developers on a level that most companies and organizations cannot. While we’ve always had a very good pulse on how developers anecdotally feel about their work and their industry, we haven’t always been consistent in capturing and conveying that insight.

To that end, we launched this annual research survey called the Developer Satisfaction Survey (DSS) in 2014. The Developer Satisfaction Survey, open to anyone involved in the video game industry in a professional or academic capacity, is the evolution of our previous survey efforts.

The 2014 DSS was a great success for an inaugural effort, yielding over 2,000 responses worldwide. Besides my own presentations of the results at numerous events worldwide, the data from the DSS was quoted in many media sources, including the New York Times and Washington Post, and referenced by many in the academic research community. The effort also resulted in two follow-up reports on Industry Trends and Employment, both of which dove deeper into the data and revealed more insights about the current state of our industry. The results also provided an impetus for new initiatives, such as the IGDA’s declared goal to double the number of women working in the industry by 2025.

For the 2015 DSS, we aimed to expand our reach and succeeded with nearly 3,000 respondents. Part of this success was due to the availability of localized versions of the DSS in the following languages beyond English: Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. The IGDA thanks Keyword’s International as well as volunteers from IGDA Japan for their valuable contribution of the localized language versions.

Also for 2015, the DSS offered was a shorter survey as it did not contain detailed questions about Quality of Life, as these will only appear every fifth year. The survey was also tailored so that questions better reflect unique sub-populations of the broad game industry community.

We’re thankful for the strongly positive reception for this research and moving forward, the DSS will serve as the IGDA’s core method by which we inform ourselves and the industry about the critical questions around developers’ satisfaction. For the sake of the long-term health of our industry, we will continue to strive to discern the demographic composition of game developers worldwide and tap into their knowledge, experiences and opinions on their well-being and on the state of the industry.

Read/Download Whitepaper: IGDA DSS 2015: Summary Report(PDF)