We, the Gamedev.js Community (led by Andrzej Mazur from Enclave Games, creator of the js13kGames competition), were wondering what tools and technologies people use to develop web games, how much do they earn, what monetization strategies are they using, and more. There was almost no up-to-date, solid data on the topic, so we decided to ask the community directly and publish the results afterwards.
The Gamedev.js Survey 2024 was open between December 4th and December 20th, and the Report was published on January 29th 2025 - we received a total of 620 submitted results. You can also see the Reports from 2021, 2022 and 2023 if you'd like to compare the answers.
Thank you to every single one of you who sent a response, promoted the Survey through your community, or in any other way helped make it happen - we really appreciate it! You are free to use any data listed below, but please give credit and link to the original source when using it, thank you!
Out of 620 total submitted surveys, this question received 612 answers, with top 10 being USA (22,5%), United Kingdom (7%), France (6%), India (6%), Brazil (4,2%), Canada (4,2%), Germany (4,1%), Poland (4,1%), Sweden (2,6%), and Italy (2,3%). There were 77 different countries selected, with many unique and exotic ones, which shows a good geographical diversity.
New question this year to see if there's a difference between the county people currently live in, and the country they were born in. Not a big one, but a difference nonetheless: few people moved from abroad to US, some left France for another country.
With 616 total answers, top responses were 26-35 (32,8%), followed by 36-45 (22,9%), 18-25 (18,7%), and <18 (12,3%). We had 11,2% of the responses from people aged 46-55, which is a significant increase from last year (6,4%).
Males are still the overwhelming majority with 90,8% of the 619 answers, followed by 4,4% from females, and 1,9% non-binary. Also, 2,9% preferred not to say.
A little bit less than two thirds of the 620 answers went for being hobbyists (62,3%), followed by self-employed (11,1%), freelancers (7,9%), and employed by a company (7,3%). Only 2,1% are employees.
Out of 617 answers, 62,4% are solo devs (almost 10% less than last year), with the second place being a team of 2-5 people (12,5%), and third 6-20 (6,3%). There are many devs who moved into 1000+ companies though as it increased from 0,5% to 2,1% this year.
Out of 618 answers, the most popular option here is 3-5 years of experience (28,3%), then 1-2 years (24,1%), and the third is 6-10 (16,3%), and fourth right after is being brand new to the space with less than a year of gamedev experience (24,9%). Those are all the people who joined before previous Survey was conducted a year ago.
Out of 614 answers this year, 2-5 released games (41%) is definitely the most popular answer, about 10% increase compared to last year. It looks like "no games at all" went down significantly from 30,2% to only 12,1% this year, which is great. Also, 6-10 went up from 9,8% to 15,3%. Almost 30 devs total released more than 50 games each, which is impressive.
New question this year to explore Game Jam participation: out of 620 developers, 39,4% never joined a single one. The next answer, 2-5, took 31,5%.
There was 60,7% out of 618 answers for Windows, 19,9% for MacOS, and 14,4% for Linux. Compared to last year, Windows went down a few percent, and Linux went down a few as well.
The sentiment is similar to the front-end development community: 54,7% for Chrome, 19,7% for Firefox, and then Edge (7,1%), Brave (6,9%), and Opera (5,2%), totaling in 620 answers. Chrome dropped a few percentage points and Opera went up.
VS Code is dominating the space with 66,2%, a 12,5% increase since last year - all the other options are below 10% each.
TypeScript (35,9%) and NPM (34,9%) are still leading the way, although Vite grew from 25,5% to 32,4%. Interestingly enough, "none" is still strong with 27,1% and the fourth place overall, beating Webpack (20,2%) in fifth. There's a long tail of various tools people are using as well.
Around two thirds (66%) out of 611 people are programming in JavaScript, while 43,9% are doing that in TypeScript, with C# slightly increasing from 18,5% to 22,1% this year. We had 9,3% of no coders, and again a long tail of other answers.
Canvas got 56,1%, WebGL 55,6%, with Local Storage being the third with 47,3%. Almost one third out of 581 are using Web Audio (29,4%), followed with 28,4% for WebSocket. WebGPU increased again from 11,7% to 14,6% and WebTransport from 2,3% to 2,9%.
Phaser is leading the way with 29,3%, but is followed by Three.js (21,4%), GDevelop (21,3%), Unity (20,9%), and Godot (20,6%). On the same level as last year is "my own ⁄ in-house" with 16,2%.
More than half of the 586 people are not using any UI library at all. Those who do are choosing mostly React (21%), though there was an 8% dicrease since last year.
Git is the most popular source control with 76,4%, while almost one fifth (18,2%) don't use any at all.
Out of 614 answers to this multiple choice question, the most popular ones were Casual (45,8%), Action (42,7%), and Adventure (39,9%), with Platform (38,8%) and Puzzle (36,3%) right after. The least selected option was Battle Royale with only 3,4%.
The best way to be up to date according to 614 answers were online forums and communities (60,1%), followed by social media (53,7%, down by 6,5% from last year), and blogs and articles (47,4%). Newsletters were added as an answer this year and got 26,7%, while "I don't" ended up with 16,9%.
Most of the graphic design assets are created by the developers themselves (72,5%), but also by downloading free assets from the Internet (52,7%), buying them (30,4%), or having a designer in the team (19,4%). Interestingly, AI tools are used by 22,5% out of 619 people already.
Given 559 answers to this question out of 620 submitted total, the most popular tool is Aseprite (37%), with Blender (27%), GIMP (26,3%) and Photoshop (24,2) right after. There's a whole variety of other tools used by the developers, including Paint and various online editors.
Almost two thirds of the 615 answers for sound and music assets are freely downloaded from the Internet (62,9%), while almost half is created by the developers themselves (48%), and one quarter is bought (26%). AI tools account for 11,7%.
Out of the 406 answers, more than half is using Audacity (57,9%), with the second Bfxr taking 13,8%, followed by Garageband (10,3%) and LMMS (7,9%). There's a whole lot of other tools folks are using as well.
The staggering majority (93,3%) of all 611 answers went for testing themselves, with 47,3% getting help from friends and family, and 20,1% from community. Only 10,3% have their own Quality Assurance team, while 4,6% don't have tests at all.
Most of the 606 developers (39,1%) have their games played at the prototype stage, with 24,3% having that with a finished game, and only 9,2% at a concept phase.
With no surprise, friends and family are the most common choice (58,9%), followed by Discord and socials (36,1%), community and fanbase (27,6%). One fifth (20,4%) out of 604 answers are not interested in the search at all.
More than half out of 612 answers are publishing on Itch.io and similar (59,3%), with own website taking the second (35,9%), and Google Play in third way lower (13,4%). Nothing published is fourth with 12,7%.
X (Twitter) is no longer the most popular platform as it dropped from 47,5% to 36,3% since last year, overtaken by Discord (39,7%). YouTube grew in popularity by a few percent to 32,8%, while "none" took the fourth place with 24,8%. New option this year, Bluesky, got the fifth place with 18,3%.
In this question we've received a total of 613 answers, out of which almost half is earning money off of their salary unrelated to game development (49,4%), while "none" was second (22,5%), followed by salary related to game development (17,9%). Client work ended up fourth (13,2%) and advertisements fifth (10,4%). Crypto and NFTs grew from 1,9% last year to 3,1% this year.
New question this year to specify the primary source of income: almost half (47,4%) is earning money from salary unrelated to game development, and one fifth (20,2%) don't have any income at all.
Another new question with 593 answers about the percentage of the gamedev income in the primary source: 0% accounts for 56,7% of the answers, while 100% for 17,5% of them.
Majority of people (58,2%) are not earning anything out of game development at all, with 17,7% earning less than $1000 a year (both add up to ~75%). The rest of the answers were spread more or less evenly, with $100k+ ending up with only 2,8%.
Out of 613 answers, the most popular answer was neutral (40,6%), up a few percent from last year, while one third (35,1%) is strongly against, and both in favor options are adding up to only 7,2% (down from 11,7% last year). The sentiment went down again, even beside the bull run, or maybe because of it?
The overwhelming majority (88,3%) out of 308 answers is not involved in any crypto related game development project, and only 11,7% is (down from 18,2% last year). If they do, there are many various chains folks are exploring.
New question about the influence of AI in game development, with roughly two thirds (67,7%) that were, in fact, influenced by Artificial Inteligence in any form. It's worth exploring the answers to this open question as the sentiment is quite negative though.
It's great to see 85,3% of all the 607 answers being positive about their happines and answering between 6 and 10, with more than half being at 8-10 range. The happiest are 105 people (17,3%), while the most popular answer was 8 (25,2%), and only 2 people (0,3%) answered with 1 (if you did, please get in touch - we'd like to help!). The sentiment here compared to last year is up by a few percent for the happiest answers (9-10) and the below average ones (3-4) though, both coming from 7 (down from 24,5% to 17,6% this year).
Out of the 411 answers to this open question, many mentioned the same things as last year: lack of free time, proper marketing to reach players, monetizing the project, missing motivation, finding work-life balance, reliable tools, and much more. Those answers have to be studied more to help developers with their problems.
This question received 377 answers raging from AI, AI, through saturation, performance on mobile devices, to distribution and discoverability, so similar challenges that folks had last year already.
This was set up to receive anything related to the survey, and it was usually used to send good vibes our way, for which we're really thankful! Out of the 183 answers, some reiterated their struggles from the previous question, others said they enjoy making games already, or are going to quit their day job to focus on game development. Not all comments were enthusiastic, but the overall feel was mostly positive.
Someone said they like turtles, someone else requested a million dollars to their bank account, while another person wanted to get at least one pizza. Also, exactly 437 people out of those 620 left their email addresses to be notified about the results, which is cool!
Join Gamedev.js Jam 2025 for Web Game Developers happening online between April 13th and 26th 2025, hosted on Itch.io. There are prizes!
Thank you again for being involved! If you have any questions, feedback about the survey itself, or any other inquiries, please get in touch via email. You can also follow @Gamedevjs on X (Twitter) or Mastodon, and join our Discord server.
Don't forget to take part in the Gamedev.js Jam 2025 and subscribe to the Gamedev.js Weekly newsletter as well, or even buy some cool swag at our Gamedev.js Shop!
This Survey in 2024 was supported by OP Guild.