Unity Gaming Report 2025: "Developers Are Managing Risk by Reducing Costs"

One of the measures developers are taking to minimise risk is to reduce costs, while games are getting bigger and bigger and both multiplayer and multi-platform releases continue to be popular. These are some of the findings of the 2025 Unity Gaming Report.

The 2025 Unity Gaming Report has been released in time for GDC 2025. The report is based on polls and surveys conducted by third parties and by the Unity team at industry events, as well as data from nearly five million Unity engine developers. The authors highlight five aspects, with the majority of the findings based on a Cint 2024 survey of 300 respondents - a computer-assisted telephone interview survey with a margin of error of +/-5.66% at the 95% confidence level.

The first is that developers manage 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 for less 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", the report states. Justin Miersch, Founder and Game/Level Designer of 314 Arts (Projekt Z: Beyond Order) in Germany, is quoted in the report as saying: "We remain as small as we are for multiple reasons. The most significant and most valuable aspect for me is how it influences the timings and workflow. As a small team, we can iterate, fix, or change entire game systems in the blink of an eye, compared to big AAA companies, where a single change has to go through multiple departments and checks before it even gets approved."

The report goes on to say that studios continue to focus on multiplayer. 64% of developers say they're working on projects with multiplayer features (including couch co-op), while a further 32% are working on networked single-player games and 4% on non-networked single-player games. Unity: "Of the studios that reported working on multiplayer games, 69% said they're creating asymmetrical experiences, games where players meet with different objectives, abilities, and gameplay mechanics."

Launching games on as many platforms as possible remains a popular strategy for extending a game's reach, audience and ROI, but studios are cautious about taking their games to new places. "While web and social media games are just starting to gain traction (11% combined), 90% of devs launched their most recent games on mobile, with desktop not far behind at 80%." Another finding is that games are getting bigger, with huge worlds, non-stop updates and even the build size of games made with Unity - but size is also being used as a way to communicate the value of a game to players. 88% of developers said that overall game play time is increasing.

To keep their in-house projects on track, many developers use tech. Unity: "96% of the studios we 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 to more mundane problems, with less than half of devs using AI tools in any one workflow."

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