"Lying" has nothing to do with it, but the vast majority of these ~240 respondents would be developers who were simply intending to release their game on Nintendo's presumptive next hardware, not ones who actually had access to develop games for the real system in October 2023 when the survey was conducted. This would be an odd thing to consider the "first real confirmation."
This is the correct and proper take... which 99% of reporting will ignore & clickbait in a means to express a conclusion not found in said poll.
I have to respectfully disagree with the take that the whole survey doesn't mean much in terms of developers working on the Switch 2 / Switch Chupacabra / whatever.
The replies about the platforms developers have the most interest in working for (the one where 32% of the surveyed developers answered with the Switch successor's option) just show exactly that, interest. At the time the survey took place (last October), given the poll of people surveyed, the vast majority of that interest comes from people who may've just heard about the system through rumours and such. Heck, some of them may have based their interest on what said in this thread, even! It's an interesting tidbit, but it doesn't tell us much about active development on the platform.
Meanwhile, the survey on the platforms they're currently working on is something that I would consider a much, much stronger evidence of things actually happening. The % of people who stated that they're working on the Switch successor isn't unusually high, which makes sense: again, given the poll of people interviewed, it makes perfect sense that only a tiny amount of them have been actually informed of the full technical details of the platform (so work can start on properly-specced PCs even before the dev kits arrive) and that an even tinier amount has already access to dev kits; after all, 18% of the interviewed developers stated to be part of an AAA company, 11% of an AA studio. Therefore, I don't agree with the idea that the vast majority of the developers replying to this specific part of the survey are merely stating their intention rather than being actually working on it.
But also, it probably helps to see this 8% of surveyed developers stating that they were already working on the Switch successor back in October with the context of what happened when the previous State of the Game Industry reports happened to mention yet-to-be-released, if not unannounced platforms in their surveys.
GDC 2013 State of the Industry Report, released in February 2013 -
https://www.vg247.com/gdc-survey-re...e-developing-for-platforms-other-than-console
In terms of the Nintendo Wii U, only 4.6% of developers are currently making a Wii U game, and just 6.4% of our surveyed developers are making their next game for the console. (Finally, an identical 11% of respondents are making their next game for upcoming Sony and Microsoft platforms.)
GDC 2016 State of the Industry Report, released in January 2016 -
https://www.ign.com/articles/2016/01/29/only-5-of-developers-working-on-a-wii-u-game-survey-says
Developer interest in Nintendo platforms, the GDC survey says, has been declining. Just 5 percent of developers surveyed are working on Wii U titles, with 3 percent bringing a game to the Nintendo 3DS. The Nintendo NX fairs even worse, with less than 1 percent of respondents working on a game for the unannounced platform.
GDC 2020 State of the Industry Report, released in January 2020 -
https://www.globenewswire.com/en/ne...ms-Renewed-Faith-in-VR-Among-Game-Makers.html
While the majority of respondents said their current projects are being developed for the PC (56 percent) and/or mobile (39 percent), 11 percent of survey respondents said their current project is being developed for the PlayStation 5, and 9 percent said they’re currently targeting the next generation Xbox Series X (still known as “Project Scarlett” at the time the survey was conducted).
All surveys that were taken between one year to one year and a half before the respective platforms' releases (and in Switch's case we can argue that back then the platform was still aiming for the Holiday 2016 target launch). Take into consideration that these surveys should be a reflection of the Western development scene for the most part, but still, we can say that the results showed turned out to be decently accurate. Both PS4 / Xbox One and PS5 / Xbox Series X | S had relatively high numbers of developers replying that they were already working on games for those sets of platforms and both sets of systems did see pretty good multiplatform early support. On the other end of the spectrum, the Switch: the less-than-1% share was pretty evident in its very early lineup. The percentage of people actively working on Switch was still relatively low in the GDC 2017 State of the Industry Report (published in January 2017, so very shortly before the launch of the platform) -
https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/gdc-state-of-the-industry-2017/
Of the polled developers, only 3 percent are currently working on games for the Nintendo Switch. Although Nintendo’s console hasn’t launched yet, only 5 percent of respondents expected their next game to be released on Switch. Despite these low numbers, developers were generally optimistic about Switch sales. Fifty percent thought the Switch will sell more units than the Wii U, which has sold approximately 13 million units worldwide. Only 13 percent thought the Switch would underperform the Wii U, while 37 percent were unsure.
Overall, the share of people who replied that they're already working on the Switch successor far outclasses the Switch at a similar timeframe while also being very close to the levels of PS4 / Xbox One and PS5 / Xbox Series X | S.
famiboards.com
