Disaster Women And Non-Binary Devs Now Make Up 32 Percent Of All Game Developers, Up From 24 Percent In 2022 - "men still make up 66 percent of all game developers" "quarter of game developers (24 percent) identified as LGBTQ+" "32 percent of all game developers now identify as female or non-binary."

https://www.thegamer.com/women-lgbtq-now-make-up-32-percent-of-all-game-developers-gdc/

https://megalodon.jp/2025-0124-2301-29/https://www.thegamer.com:443/women-lgbtq-now-make-up-32-percent-of-all-game-developers-gdc/

• Males still make up 66% of game developers, down from 75% in 2020.
• Almost a quarter of developers identify as LGBTQ+, a 3% increase.
• Racial diversity at studios is improving, but the majority of developers are still White/Caucasian.

The game development space is undergoing a seismic shift in its diversity makeup, with the GDC State of the Game Industry report finding that 32 percent of all game developers now identify as female or non-binary.

This is up three percent when compared to last year's report and eight percent when compared to 2022's. However, it suggests that women and non-binary developers are still slightly under-represented when compared to their male counterparts.

Males Still Make Up 66 Percent Of All Game Developers, 24 Percent Identify As LGBTQ+​

GDC's report finds that men still make up 66 percent of all game developers, down from 75 percent in 2020—a nine percent decrease over the last four years. 66 percent, of course, still puts males in the majority.

Alongside an increase in women and non-binary developers, the report found that almost a quarter of game developers (24 percent) identified as LGBTQ+. This represents a three percent year-on-year increase. It found that almost half (43 percent) of developers aged between 18 and 24 identify as LGBTQ+, with women far more likely to do so.

In terms of ethnicity, the State of the Game industry report found that 59 percent of developers were White/Caucasian, 10 percent were Hispanic, Latino, or of Spanish Origin, and only three percent were Black, African, or Caribbean.

This split meant that there was a slight increase in racial diversity at game studios, with the number of White/Caucasian respondents down from 64 percent, but development houses were still predominantly staffed by the latter. The publishers of the report do note that due to the fact that the survey takes place in the United States, certain responses may "not always represent the views of the global community at large."

The culmination of the 'Global Game Developer Community' section of GDC's report found that 35 percent of all respondents were white, male, and not part of the LGBTQ+ community. It shows that while strides have been made to diversify the industry, there is still a little way to go.

Calls for broader diversity in the gaming space have been growing for several years now, and several prominent game developers and studios have spoken up about the issue. Last year, Tales of Kenzera: Zau's director, Abubakar Salim, delivered a heartfelt message following racial abuse he'd received, saying that diverse games are "for everyone," and CD Projekt Red's CEO recently rubbished claims that "diversity hires" were ruining the studio. But as support grows for these initiatives, so does discontent from a vocal minority.

 

[tehpope]

at least for me, a great game is one that I come back to every year or so. the most "recent" one I can think of right now is baldur's gate 3, but aside from that I find myself mostly replaying ps2, ps3 and early ps4 era games.

Balatro, Into the Breach, Inscryption. A few games I've played a lot of that are pretty recent. The main issue is with AAA gaming. The indies are doing fine. Programmers are shit. They care more about pushing marxist shit than making a good game. Budgets are ballooning. A crash ready to happen.

 

[Fort Brooks]

Balatro, Into the Breach, Inscryption. A few games I've played a lot of that are pretty recent. The main issue is with AAA gaming. The indies are doing fine. Programmers are shit. They care more about pushing marxist shit than making a good game. Budgets are ballooning. A crash ready to happen.

Into the Breach is a masterpiece of balance and design, highly recommend to anyone.

"Programmers are shit" is semi-true. The problem is that the exact same cultural brainrot is permeating the discipline. In the same way that it infects other things (pick your poison), it underlines a ridiculous approach towards programming that is absolutely destroying software as a whole. It's a literal crisis, and web suffers the most. In the gamedev sphere, the problems areas are typically OOP, generalised engines such as Unreal and Unity, ECS, Clean Code™, and all manner of other premature attempts at compression. Go check out Casey Muratori's lectures or his handmade hero project to get a sense of the problem, and then look into the reception (hint: he has to turn the comments off). Enshittified programming is fuelled by feelings and preferences, rather than objective truths (and no, I'm not talking about tabs/spaces, vim/emacs etc).

There is hope though. There is a mindset that rejects this crap, and advocates for a data-driven, informed approach that selects for simplicity and respects the hardware. The movement is sparse, but it is not difficult to find proponents, even some who livestream (they tend to use C, Zig, and Odin, with the web devs advocating for vanilla JS & CSS, proper REST, and perhaps htmx or php). The further you get from the complex mainstream nightmares, the more apparent it becomes that there is a huge cultural issue, just like every other field, that fuels cognitive dissonance, resulting in poor quality code.

It might sound ridiculous at first, but once you go down the rabbit hole the link between shit coding practices and "woke" becomes ever more visible. It absolutely has an impact on the quality of the final product, and then you throw in your DEI troonslop on the top, and boom - you got your shitty game industry, shitty websites, and shitty "apps".

 

[X Prime]

Gaming really was better when it wasn't this mainstream thing. It's adjacent to Hollywood and the further it goes in that direction the shittier it will become.

Gaming was peak when it was, like @Der weiße Teufel said, white nerds making games but also when it was primarily white nerds playing games. It was our hobby and it was gatekept properly to prevent tourists and normies from entering. Now it's a fucking mess of e-sluts and gaming hipsters streaming whatever flavor of the month shit comes out. Plus you have the endless diarrhea of "gAm1Ng R3eViEwErS" who think they are the authority on how games should be made and what's good or bad even though they don't care outside of clout and being shills for special benefits. It's sickening.

Moral of the story: keep normies out of your hobby.

I will once again tap the sign:

In my experience, you can chart a fandom's decline to a couple of things:

1) Prevalence of women of a certain type (read: fujoshis, the sex obsessed)

2) Prevalence of browns (particularly from Latin America) with an extremely poor grasp of English

3) Prevalence of LGBTQ+ types

If these are a significant proportion of prominent figures in a given fandom, avoid it like the plague. It will be a vortex of autism and stupid drama. You can literally chart fandom decline in some cases by watching if relatively well adjusted white dudes are interested and steering discussion, it's absurd.

Fandoms have invaded actual game dev with disastrous results. The writers of fujoshi sclickfic back in the day, who were reviled by the wider fandoms, are now the ones writing for the actual games.

This is why you do not want retro game revivals either.

 

[Stoneheart]

So the number of real woman went down?

 

[stupid frog]

>24% was all it took to make games more shit

 

[Pentex]

Calls for broader diversity in the gaming space have been growing for several years now, and several prominent game developers and studios have spoken up about the issue.

Calls from who?
The same corporate shills and useful idiots who have been pressing for 'moar gurlz' since the IGDA was founded (to slowly capture the industry from the inside)?
The women who, until the late 2000s, were only 10% of the gaming market?
The studios that have collapsed or are in the process of collapsing for saturation of 'diversity'?
Sounds to me like the only calls the industry should be listening to are the calls of the people who actually buy games and don't want this crap the AAA industry has spent the last decade slowly adding to the soup.

 

[Pokemon Conquistador]

All this proves is that Entryism is successful against White Men.

 

[Masturbator]

35% troons yet none can code