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 2025 was open between December 9th and December 19th, and the Report was published on December 24th 2025 - we received a total of 445 submitted results. You can also see the Reports from 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 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 445 total submitted surveys, this question received all 445 answers, with top 5 being USA (23,6%), France (8%), United Kingdom (7,9%), India (4,9%), and Canada (4,3%). There were many unique and exotic countries selected this year again, which shows a good geographical diversity.
The question to see if there's a difference between the county people currently live in, and the country they were born in. Same as last year: few people moved from abroad to the USA.
With 441 total answers, top responses were 36-45 (31,5%), followed by 26-35 (27,7%), 18-25 (16,1%), 46-55 (11,6%), and <18 (9,1%). The first two answers switched places compared to last year, as 36-45 range grew about 10%.
Males are still the overwhelming majority with 89,3% of the 441 answers, followed by 6,1% from females (up from 4,4% last year), and 1,8% non-binary. Also, 2,7% preferred not to say.
A little bit less than two thirds of the 442 answers went for being hobbyists (61,8%), followed by self-employed (12,9%), business owners (7,2%), freelancers (6,8%), and employed by a company (6,8% as well). Only 2% are employees.
Out of 443 answers, 62,8% are solo devs (almost the exact same as last year), with the second place being a team of 2-5 people (10,8%), and third 6-20 (3,6%, which dropped from 6,3%). The sharp increase in moving into 1000+ companies last year reversed and dropped from 2,1% to 1,4% this year.
Out of 442 answers, the most popular option here is 3-5 years of experience (27,1%), then 1-2 years (23,5%), the third is 6-10 (17%), and fourth right after with less than a year of gamedev experience (13,3%). Those are all the people who joined after previous Survey was conducted a year ago.
Out of 443 answers this year, 2-5 released games (41,1%) is still the most popular answer, very similar compared to last year. It looks like "no games at all" went down again from 12,1% to 8,4% this year, which is great. Also, 6-10 went up from 15,3% to 17,2%. Exactly 17 devs total released more than 50 games each, which is impressive.
Out of 442 developers, 31,4% entered 2-5 jams, while 28,7% never joined a single one. The next answer, 6-10, took 14,3%.
There was 59,1% out of 445 answers for Windows, 21,3% for MacOS, and 12,8% for Linux. Compared to last year, MacOS went up a bit.
The sentiment is similar to the front-end development community: 57,8% for Chrome, 17,3% for Firefox, then Brave (8,1%) and Edge (6,5%), totaling in 445 answers. Chrome bounced a few percentage points up, same as Brave.
VS Code is dominating the space with 59,9%, though with a 6% decrease since last year - all the other options are below 10% each.
NPM (42,3%) and TypeScript (41,4%) are still leading the way, although Vite grew again from 32,4% to 40,4%. Interestingly enough, "none" is still strong with 25,2% and the fourth place overall, beating Webpack (21,3%) in fifth. There's a long tail of various tools people are using as well.
Around two thirds (64,7%) out of 442 people are programming in JavaScript, while 47,5% are doing that in TypeScript, with C# slightly increasing again from 22,1% to 24% this year. We had 6,3% of no coders, and again a long tail of other answers.
WebGL increased from 55,6% to 60%, Canvas stayed at 56,9%, with Local Storage being the third with 49,3%. Almost one third out of 422 are using WebSocket (28,4%), followed with 28,2% for Web Audio. WebGPU increased again from 14,6% to 17,5%.
Phaser is still leading the way with 35,8%, but is followed by a 4% increase in both Unity (24,7%) and Godot (24,4%). Next one is Three.js (21,7%) and GDevelop (20,4%). A bit lower than last year is "my own ⁄ in-house" with 13,6%. New additions this year include Excalibur.js and Wonderland Engine.
Almost half of the 427 people are not using any UI library at all, and those who do are choosing mostly React (22%).
Git is still the most popular source control with 78,7%, while 13,2% (down from 18,2%) don't use any at all.
Out of 440 answers to this multiple choice question, the most popular ones were Casual (44,6%) and Action (44,1%), with Puzzle (41,8%) and Adventure (40,7%) right after. The least selected option was Battle Royale with only 2,7%.
The best way to be up to date according to 438 answers were online forums and communities (61,6%), followed by social media (56,4%, up by 3% from last year), and blogs and articles (44,5%). Newsletters dropped 3% and got 23,3%, while "I don't" ended up with 15,3%.
Most of the graphic design assets are created by the developers themselves (74,4%), but also by downloading free assets from the Internet (54%), buying them (33,5%), or having a designer in the team (18%). Interestingly, AI tools are used by 28,1% out of 445 people already, up from 22,5% last year.
Given 401 answers to this question out of 445 submitted total, the most popular tool is Aseprite (30,9%, down from 37% last year), with GIMP (28,4%) moving to the second place, Blender (27,9%) dropping to third, and Photoshop (19%) going all the way down from 24,2%. There's a whole variety of other tools used by the developers, including Paint and various online editors.
Almost two thirds of the 440 answers for sound and music assets are freely downloaded from the Internet (63,4%), while almost half is created by the developers themselves (45,5%), and almost one third is bought (30%). AI tools account for 18,4%, up from 11,7% last year.
Out of the 283 answers, more than half is using Audacity (58,3%), with the second Bfxr taking 15,2%, followed by Garageband (8,5%) and LMMS (6%). There's a whole lot of other tools folks are using as well.
The staggering majority (95%) of all 440 answers went for testing themselves, with exactly 50% getting help from friends and family, and 25% from community. Only 8,2% have their own Quality Assurance team, while 4,1% don't have tests at all.
Most of the 433 developers (39,7%) have their games played at the first prototype stage, 21% having that with a totally finished game, and only 9% at a concept phase.
With no surprise, friends and family are the most common choice (60,9%), followed by Discord and socials (38,2%), community and fanbase (32,7% which is up by about 5%). Roughly one sixth (17,6%) out of 437 answers are not interested in the search at all.
Two thirds out of 439 answers are publishing on Itch.io and similar (67,4%), with own website taking the second (38,3%), and Steam (15,9%) taking over Google Play (15,7%). Nothing published is fifth with 10,5% - about 2% less than last year.
Discord grew year by year again (this time from 39,7% to 43,7%), with X ⁄ Twitter still dropping (from 36,3% to 34,3%). YouTube is hovering at around one third (32,7%), while "none" took the fourth place with 24,9%. Reddit grew by about 5%.
In this question we've received a total of 440 answers, out of which more than half is earning money off of their salary unrelated to game development (54,1%), while "none" was second (21,8%), followed by client work (15,7%). Salary related to game development ended up fourth (15%, slight increase) and advertisements fifth (8,6%).
The primary source of income? More than half (53,2%) is earning money from salary unrelated to game development, and less than one fifth (18,2%) don't have any income at all.
The 423 answers about the percentage of the gamedev income in the primary source: 0% accounts for 61,5% of the answers (up about 5%), while 100% for 15,3% of them (down about 2%).
Majority of people (63%, up from 58,2% last year) are not earning anything out of game development at all, with 15,4% earning less than $1000 a year (both add up to 78,4%). The rest of the answers were spread more or less evenly, with $100k+ ending up for only 2,3% of respondents.
Out of 440 answers, the most popular one was neutral (39,1%), while one third (35,9%) is strongly against, and both in favor options are adding up to only 8,6% (up from 7,2% last year). The sentiment didn't move much compared to the previous results.
The overwhelming majority (81,5%) out of 222 answers is not involved in any crypto related game development project, and only 18,5% is (up from 11,7% last year). If they do, there are many various chains folks are exploring.
The influence of AI in game development is huge: 79% of devs (up from 67,7%) out of 344 respondents were influenced by Artificial Intelligence in any form, while 21% didn't (down from 32,3%). It's worth exploring the answers to this open question as the sentiment is still quite negative.
It's great to see 87,5% of all the 439 answers being positive about their happiness and answering between 6 and 10, with more than half being at 8-10 range. The happiest are 73 people (16,6%), while the most popular answer was 8 (29,2%), and no one answered with 1! The sentiment here compared to last year is down by a few percent though, mostly from the happiest answers (9-10) to the happy ones (6-8).
Out of all the answers to this open question, many mentioned the same things as in previous years: 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 many various answers raging from even stronger presence of AI, through saturation, performance on mobile devices, to distribution and discoverability, so similar challenges that folks had in past years 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 all the 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 want more AI tools, someone else they want less AI tools, one commented "meow", while the other said they "find it hard to deal with vibe ciders who try to put a semicolon in phytoplankton", or that indies are not real indies, just cheap workers. Also, exactly 316 people out of those 445 left their email addresses to be notified about the results, which is cool!
Join Gamedev.js Jam 2026 for Web Game Developers happening online between April 13th and 26th 2026, hosted on Itch.io. There are prizes!
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This Survey in 2025 was supported by GitHub.