2012-13 Game Designer Survey

Game Designer Survey Results

In the last half of December through the first part of February I distributed a survey for game designers on the Internet:  "This is a short (10 questions, five minutes or less) survey for people who call themselves game designers, video or tabletop (which is as good a way to define who game designers are as any other)."  In the end, 142 respondents have had a game published commercially, along with 46 self-publishers, more than half of the 346 respondents.  Here are the results.

Because this was conducted through the free surveymonkey service, I'm unable to provide much in the way of analysis of the results.  It was a proof-of-concept survey, and curiosity survey, rather than one with a specific aim.  So I can be accused of violating my own survey rule, "only ask a question that can change your [the survey-taker's] behavior".

With nearly 350 responses, I think the proof-of-concept part has worked.   Ultimately I intend to use information from surveys, as well as interview questions, in support of a book about being a game designer, how to become one, how to behave in order to be taken seriously by publishers, how to market games, how to license games, intellectual property protection, etc.  In other words, all the parts of a game designers life that I did not address in my "Game Design" book for lack of space, and because I wanted to focus on the actual process of design in that first book.

Some observations:

While nearly a third of respondents are under 30 years old, the 30-49 group constituted more than 60%.

Respondents play even more video games than tabletop, though how much that is skewed by the many free-to-play and short experience video games we cannot say. 

Nearly 50% have been to game meetings of a thousand people or more.

More than 13% have a game related degree or are working toward one.

A veteran game designer commenting on the survey told me that video game designers rarely read books, though they might look at one to help them solve a specific problem.  I asked about game design books (#6) because my experience as a teacher is that people are much less likely now, than decades ago, to read a non-fiction book.  Some students now don’t even get a copy of the textbook for a class.  Part of that fault may be that most game design books are enormous, offputting tomes, many of them quite expensive.

As many have said, you’re not really a game designer until someone other than you has played your prototype.  About 85% of respondents have reached that stage in their work.  I also asked how many designs respondents are working on (#9), because to my mind veteran designers work on several (if not many) at once.  More than 55% of respondents are working on at least three games.

Not surprisingly, I left out some choices in the question about sources of information about games and game design (#8).  I didn't even list blogs, though I've written a game design blog since 2004.  Duh.

Many people did not answer question 10, perhaps I should have added an answer “I don’t know what this is.”  Still, the number who have supported crowd-funding (171, about half of respondents) is impressive.

Many respondents offered comments.  I have read them all, though I won't include many here.

I am happy to hear suggestions for questions in any further surveys.  You can get in touch with me through my blogs or website (http://pulsiphergames.com).

F:ATs blog editor allows insertion from MS Word, but it's hard to predict how this will look on a standard Web page.  An Excel spreadsheet of the results is at http://pulsiphergames.com/Surveys/GameDesignerSurvey2012-13Results.xls .