- What is Game Development Software? Game Development software helps individual developers, gaming companies, and educational institutions create, distribute, and monetize games. These solutions often offer additional capabilities such as user behavior analytics, marketing, and social features.
- Game programmers typically specialize in a specific platform - PCs, consoles, cell phones or online - and in a particular aspect of game development, such as special effects, artificial intelligence.
1. What is game development software?
Game development software enables businesses, freelancers, and academic institutions to build, distribute, and monetize games. These systems streamline the development process and reduce operational costs through automation and predefined gaming templates. Most game development software solutions include additional capabilities such as user behavior analytics, marketing management, and social features.
Best Software For Programmers
A game programmer is a software engineer, programmer, or computer scientist who primarily develops codebases for video games or related software, such as game development tools. Game programming has many specialized disciplines, all of which fall under the umbrella term of 'game programmer'. A game programmer should not be confused with a game designer, who works on game design. Apr 29, 2016 A video game programmer is a software engineer who creates the code that makes a video game run. Due to the complexity of today's video games, most programmers specialize in one area of game.
2. The benefits of game development software
- Reduced operational costs: Game development platforms help organizations quickly write game codes with the help of predefined templates to reduce project time and required resources. These templates reduce human coding errors, and drive development costs down through the use of reusable code. This helps project leaders minimize project costs by streamlining involved processes.
- Increased collaboration: Game development platforms allow coding teams to seamlessly collaborate and efficiently manage projects through functionalities such as task management, live chat, asset management, and more. These collaboration tools also let managers track the team's performance and ensure timely project completion.
Game Development Software Requirements
3. Typical features of game development software
- Code-free development: Allows developers to create wizards and visual interfaces for game development without writing code.
- Animation: Allows developers to create, customize, and add animations to a game.
- Integrated development environment: Provides a graphical user interface for testing, debugging, and compiling the code.
- Physics simulation: Implement laws of physics within a game.
- Prototyping: Create, manage, and provide access to prototypes.
4. The cost of game development software
Most products in the market are priced on a 'per user, per month' basis, and can be divided into three pricing tiers based on their starting price:
Price ranges*:
- $0 - $12
- $12 - $25
- $25+
* The pricing included in this list is for the entry-level/lowest priced offering found on vendor websites on November 29, 2018. These ranges correspond to the 25th, 75th and 100th percentiles of the pricing information found on vendor websites of sample products.
The above list summarizes pricing for the base plans of most products. Enterprise or premium products that are priced higher often include additional features such as in-game analytics, simulations, 3D gaming, player management, and virtual reality.
5. Considerations when purchasing game development software
- Integration with third-party solutions: Integration is one of the most critical factors for businesses to evaluate when purchasing game development software. Since developers often need access to best-of-breed functionalities - such as asset management, advanced analytics, video editing, and content modeling - available as third-party integrations, it's important for businesses to select game development programs that work with their existing or desired tools.
- Pricing considerations: The game development software market offers hundreds of solutions with varying pricing models (e.g. subscriptions, one-time licensing, and per user, per month). Pricing also varies based on software capabilities, inclusion of advanced features (e.g. virtual reality, 3D gaming, artificial intelligence), customer support, training, and database management. Buyers of game development programs should carefully determine what is included at which price points to calculate their total cost of ownership before making a purchase.
6. Relevant game development software
- Games will get smarter with artificial intelligence (AI) technologies: Mainstream adoption of AI technology in the gaming industry will transform the market, resulting in smarter and more engaging products/experiences. With the help of AI-enhanced recommendation engines, developers will be able to suggest additional/new products to customers based on their past playing behaviors and purchases, increasing both customer retention rates and revenue. According to our research, over the next three to five years almost all software applications - including game development platforms will contain some level of AI functionality.
- Virtual reality to revolutionize gaming: Successful use cases of virtual reality games have sent waves across the gaming community; games like Pokemon Go have set a new standard by providing an immersive, augmented reality experience. In the coming years, we expect virtual reality technologies to have a greater impact on educational games by providing interactive learning exercises to achieve higher engagement levels. According to our research, 33% of small businesses will adopt virtual reality technologies to train their employees in the coming years. Expect the gaming industry to increase its focus on these areas to capture this growing market of educational gamification.
Sources
Products evaluated for pricing calculation were taken from Capterra's Game Development Platform directory (sorted by 'most reviewed'). The pricing ranges exclude freemium versions of these products. The highlighted features were identified based on their relevance and the percentage of products in Capterra's database that offer them.
The following sources were used for this document:
- Top 5 Tech Trends for Small Business, Capterra (Date accessed: November 29, 2018)