With its comparatively young developer work force, the Asia Pacific region has three times more developers focusing on game development than North America.
According to a recent study by Evans Data Corp., 10 percent of developers in the Asia Pacific region are working on computer games. The Evans survey featured responses from nearly 400 developers, the company said.
“Developers in the Asia Pacific region tend to be younger than developers in other parts of the world. Most are under 30, and only a small proportion are over 50 years old,” said John Andrews, president and CEO of Evans Data Corp., Santa Criz, Calif. Andrews said he believes the relative youth of the Asia Pacific developers migth be a factor in their focus on game development and developing applications for mobile devices.
Indeed, nearly a quarter of developers are writing mobile applications, and of those, 25 percent spend more than half of their time on mobile applications, the Evans survey said. Further, the study showed that the majority of APAC developers are young. Three quarters—74 percent—are 30 years old or younger, and this proportion has increased in the last year. Meanwhile, only 3 percent of the APAC developers are more than 50 years old, compared to 26 percent of the North American developer population.
The Evans survey indicated that SOAs (service-oriented architectures) are being implemented across APAC, with a more than a third of respondents, or 37 percent, saying their organization is currently developing or already has an SOA deployed.
Other findings show that the use of C/C++ in the APAC region has fallen off by 10 percentage points in the last six months, marking the first significant decline in the last four years, the company said.
In addition, the survey showed that Microsoft dominates the database market in the region, with 63 percent of respondents claiming to use SQL Server, compared to 48 percent using MySQL or Oracle, Evans officials said.