GDC is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Day[9], Game of Thrones, NBC Universal talks added to GDC Next

Game Developers Conference Next organizers have added new sessions to the November event, including NBC Universal on second screen gaming and broadcast TV experiments, Disruptor Beam on making a story-driven social (and upcoming mobile) game based on popular IP, and Sean "Day[9]" Plott on designing games with an eSports edge.
GDC Next is the spiritual successor to GDC Online. The new event aims to highlight the future of video games, and will take place alongside the App Developers Conference on November 5th-7th, 2013 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
Continuing the shifted focus for GDC Next, organizers are announcing three new talks today, as follows:
Firstly, famed Starcraft II commentator and eSports personality Sean "Day[9]" Plott will explain how to design games with spectators in mind in 'The Observer Friendly Game.'
Plott will discuss what makes a game as fun to watch as it is to play, in order to tap into the community-building potential of streaming eSports events, Let's Play videos, and other spectator-friendly applications for games.

As online reg ends, Ubisoft, mobile talks added to GDC Europe 2013

With discounted online registration for GDC Europe 2013 ending tomorrow, organizers have announced several more notable sessions from online and mobile game developers.
These include Ubisoft Blue Byte on avoiding pay-to-win in free-to-play, PerBlue's free-to-play design and production tips from Parallel Kingdom, Scopely's VP on mobile player retention, and AppLift's business analytics.
GDC Europe will take place Monday through Wednesday, August 19th-21st at the Cologne Congress-Centrum Ost in Cologne, Germany -- just ahead of (and co-located with) the massive 275,000 person Gamescom event, with all GDC Europe passes also guaranteeing entrance to Gamescom.
In 'Getting Past Pay to Win,' senior online game supervisor at Ubisoft Blue Byte, Teut Weidemann [The Settlers Online (pictured), Anno Online] will explain how to avoid pay-to-win design in free-to-play games. He will also share how Ubisoft designs monetization methods that its players accept as not being too aggressive nor unfair.

GDC Europe 2013 adds Microsoft, Google, App Annie vendor sessions

With GDC Europe 2013 less than two weeks away, organizers have rounded up several notable vendor sessions, including new talks from Microsoft on its 'Commitment to Indie Success' and cross-platform talks, Google's Dev Day, Blackberry 10 porting and gaming strategy tips, and App Annie's mobile analytics talk.
GDC Europe will take place Monday through Wednesday, August 19th-21st at the Cologne Congress-Centrum Ost in Cologne, Germany -- just ahead of (and co-located with) the massive 275,000 person Gamescom event, with all GDC Europe passes also guaranteeing entrance to Gamescom.
The Google-sponsored, programming-focused 'Google Developer Day' on Tuesday August 20th now has a full schedule listed, and will go over getting the most out of Google's Cloud, Play service, and Mobile App Analytics, along with showing developers how to attract the most valuable users and how to retain them.
Microsoft will sponsor two freshly announced sessions; the first is entitled 'Be What's Next: Microsoft's Commitment to Indie Success.' Microsoft evangelist Kristina Rothe joins Flaregames' Gunnar Lott (former EIC of GameStar), as he shares how Royal Revolt reached 1 million downloads on Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 in just four weeks.
Microsoft's second session with evangelist Rothe will be 'Building Tomorrow's Blockbuster Today Across Phones, Tablets, and PCs.' Joined by Dlala Studios CEO Anthony James Grand-Scrutton, he will discuss how to design, build, and publish your game in the most effective way, as he did with space-based physics adventure Jansky!.

Candy Crush Saga, Crysis, Tale of Tales talks added to GDC Europe 2013

With GDC Europe 2013 two weeks away, organizers have highlighted new conference sessions, including King.com's postmortem on mega-hit Candy Crush Saga, Crytek on Crysis's environmental art production, and Tale of Tales's sneak peek at three new projects as the studio looks into its last and next 10 years.
GDC Europe will take place Monday through Wednesday, August 19th-21st at the Cologne Congress-Centrum Ost in Cologne, Germany -- just ahead of (and co-located with) the massive 275,000 person Gamescom event, with all GDC Europe passes also guaranteeing entrance to Gamescom.
First up, King.com's Tommy Palm will present the 'Candy Crush Postmortem: Luck in the Right Places,' discussing the mega-hit casual game's genesis. Included in the talk will be how it progressed from "a small competitive flash game and a social envelope to adjust it to Facebook, with an aggressive cross-platform push onto mobile."
In 'The Next Ten Years of Tale of Tales' as part of the Independent Games Summit, studio co-founders Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey will examine their artistic experiments such as Bientot l'ete, The Graveyard, and The Path from the past decade and share their hopes for the future, along with showing off three new projects. They will also discuss how they organize their artistic practice in video games, despite a discouraging commercial climate.

2014 Independent Games Festival opens call for submissions

Submissions are now officially open for the 2014 Independent Games Festival, the signature competition for indie games, to be held for a 16th year during GDC 2014 in San Francisco next March. This directly follows a record-breaking year which saw nearly 900 entries for the 2013 event, including top prizewinners like FTL: Faster Than Light, Cart Life, and Kentucky Route Zero.
The deadlines for the Main and Student Showcase categories for the 16th IGF are October 19th and October 31st, 2013 respectively, with finalists announced in January 2014. Finalists' games will once again be playable at the packed IGF Pavilion on the Game Developers Conference 2014 Expo Floor, and will compete for nearly $60,000 in prizes.
These plaudits include the Excellence in Visual Art, Audio, Design, and Narrative Awards, which will have an expanded amount of six finalists each, with the winner getting $3,000 in each category. There will also be an expanded six finalists for the $30,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize.
This year also sees the return of the Best Student Game award, with eight finalists ($3,000 prize), and the special Nuovo Award ($5,000, eight finalists) will again honor 'abstract, shortform, and unconventional' games. Finally, the IGF Audience Award ($3,000) will be decided by a public vote from all of the Main Competition finalists.

GDC China adds CCP, Klei, Blizzard talks; early reg ends August 9

One day before the discounted registration deadline, GDC China organizers have added more presentations for its September event, with talks on Mark of the Ninja's stealth design, EVE Online's network interface, and StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm's cinematic production.
UBM Tech Game Network's GDC China, now in its sixth year, has moved up to September this year, running from the 15th to the 17th at the Shanghai International Convention Center in Shanghai, China. The event will be co-located with Cloud Connect China.
In 'Designing Mark of the Ninja,' Klei's lead designer Nels Anderson will discuss how his team adapted stealth gameplay to side-scrolling 2D for the XBLA and PC hit. Attendees will get an up-close look at how Klei innovates within established genres by seeking to understand the true appeal of a genre while avoiding genre tropes.
In 'How Hard Could It Be? The Story of a Cinematic,' Blizzard's lead writer Brian Kindregan will trace the story development of a challenging StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm cinematic. By walking the audience through multiple revisions of the same cinematic, Kindregan will demonstrate how his team reconciled differences between the cinematic production process and the game design process, integrated feedback, and made significant narrative choices -- and show how that impacted the final story.
Lastly, in 'CREST: An Account of Deploying a RESTful Interface to an Established MMO,' CCP senior network programmer Nicolas Tittley will discuss the development process behind CREST, CCP's new REST-style cross-platform network interface for the EVE Online universe. He will touch on its ease of use, scalability, and its enabling multiple 3rd party applications and CCP's new PS3 shooter, Dust 514.

'Unconsoles', BBC, Village Life! talks added for GDC Europe

As GDC Europe 2013 approaches this month, organizers highlighted new sessions for the Smartphone & Tablet Games Summit, with talks on Nvidia's (Project) Shield, GameStick, MOGA and other 'unconsoles', plus Playdemic on the cross-platform Village Life! and the BBC on children's game strategies.
GDC Europe will take place Monday through Wednesday, August 19th-21st at the Cologne Congress-Centrum Ost in Cologne, Germany -- just ahead of (and co-located with) the massive 275,000 person Gamescom event, with all GDC Europe passes also guaranteeing entrance to Gamescom.
Firstly, developers will learn how to cope with the challenges of implementing different control schemes and designing for near and far screens, as well as finding the right business model for each of the new channels in the panel 'Will Unconsoles Become the Real Next-Gen Consoles?'.
This panel will include Michael Schade, CEO of Fishlabs (Galaxy of Fire); Phil Scott, technical evangelist at Nvidia (the Project Shield portable console); Sameer Baroova, Head of Games at PlayJam (casual game provider for smart TVs, GameStick, and more); and Brian Bruning, director of mobile phone pocket controller provider MOGA as they discuss what they've dubbed to be "possibly the most disruptive year in video game history."

Warface, ibb & obb, mobile analytics talks added to GDC Europe

As GDC Europe 2013 approaches this month, organizers continue to highlight notable sessions, including extensive overviews of ibb & obb for PlayStation Network and Crytek's free-to-play FPS Warface, along with an Android and iOS analytics session by analytics provider Flurry.
GDC Europe will take place Monday through Wednesday, August 19th-21st at the Cologne Congress-Centrum Ost in Cologne, Germany -- just ahead of (and co-located with) the massive 275,000 person Gamescom event, with all GDC Europe passes also guaranteeing entrance to Gamescom.
Crytek's general manager Nick Button-Brown will review Crytek's ten key decisions from seven years of developing their free-to-play FPS Warface in '10 Decisions That Took Warface to Our First 10 Million Users.' The discussion will include insights from the partners that Crytek worked with, the challenges involved with switching from a traditional games platform to a F2P business model mid-development, and more.
Sparpweed's two-man indie team Roland IJzermans and Richard Boeser will examine their critically acclaimed PlayStation Network co-op platformer in 'ibb & obb - Ten Talking Points.' The Indiecade at E3 2008 selection and 2013 Develop Indie Showcase winner has over five years of development history behind it, and Sparpweed will discuss everything from their finances to their artistic choices during the dev process.
Finally, Flurry's publisher manager Guillaume Larrieu will share insights into how gender, age, engagement, retention and mobile game mechanics are related in 'Smartphone & Tablet Apps: Mobile Game Metrics.' He'll be drawing on data from over 1 billion mobile Android and iOS app gaming sessions per day in order to demonstrate how analytics can help devs build games to attract key audiences, improve monetization plans, and more.

eSports, 'next gaming decade,' and China talks added to GDC Next

Game Developers Conference Next organizers have added new talks to the event's Business & Marketing discipline, with veteran Starr Long (pictured) on 'Nine Trends For The Next Decade Of Video Games', ESL organizer Turtle Entertainment on the eSports ecosystem, and Niko Partners' market research on China and Southeast Asia.
GDC Next is the spiritual successor to GDC Online. The new event aims to highlight the future of video games, and will take place alongside the App Developers Conference on November 5th-7th, 2013 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
Starr Long will draw from his 20 years of industry experience, from project director of Ultima Online to now executive producer of the $2.3 million crowd-funded Shroud of the Avatar, to propose 'Nine Trends For The Next Decade Of Video Games.' In this talk, Long will explore how trends like 3D printing and wearable tech can change the way we make and consume games -- and how said trends will combine with each other to produce even more drastic changes down the line.
Turtle Entertainment's VP of gaming communities David Hiltscher will explain the ins and outs of the eSports (professional competitive games) industry in a talk called 'Inside the eSports Ecosystem; A Business Overview.' Hiltscher, who oversees the ESL eSports leagues, will use his work with companies like Riot Games (League of Legends) and Wargaming (World of Tanks) to discuss how the eSports ecosystem works, who the major players are, and how big it has become.

Thomas Was Alone, pop-up arcade, public play talks added to GDC Europe

Organizers have highlighted several notable talks for next month's Independent Games Summit at GDC Europe in Cologne, with talks on Thomas Was Alone; indie arcade postmortems from Zo-ii, Wild Rumpus, and Glitchnap; and an international collaborative project by the Copenhagen Game Collective to create simple games in public spaces of Male, the capital of the Republic of the Maldives.
These talks are part of GDC Europe 2013's Independent Games Summit, which will take place Tuesday, August 20th, during the three-day conference at Cologne Congress-Centrum Ost in Cologne, Germany -- just ahead of (and co-located with) the 275,000 person Gamescom event.
All GDC Europe attendees may access the Independent Games Summit, either with a reduced-price Independent Games Summit pass or any other pass. The Independent Games Summit Pass will also include a two-day pass to the Gamescom event itself, including admission during the business day on Wednesday, August 21st -- a significant additional perk.
Zo-ii's Zuraida Buter (Playful Arts Festival), Wild Rumpus's Marie Foulston, and Glitchnap's Jonatan Van Hove will speak about their efforts organizing and curating pop-up indie game events in 'Pop-Up Arcade: Postmortems on Indie Arcades and Events.' The talk will range from details on building a DIY arcade machine without a budget, to their views on the impact and importance of these events on game and play culture.

Papo & Yo, Unity, analytics talks added to GDC China 2013

GDC China organizers have begun to select presentations for the upcoming event, with the first talks covering multiplatform development tips with Unity3D, predictive analytics of online players, and the emotional journey for players in Papo & Yo (pictured).
Organized by UBM Tech Game Network, GDC China, now in its sixth year, has moved up to September this year, running the 15th to the 17th at the Shanghai International Convention Center in Shanghai, China. The event will be co-located with Cloud Connect China.
As part of the Business & Marketing Track, former Havok co-founder and Swrve CTO Steven Collins will discuss analytics his company has used with clients such as Epic and Activision in the talk 'Predicting Player Propensities in Online Games.' He will show how the tools can predict behavior, score users, test different actions and optimize strategies for exploiting the results of the prediction, all based on the players' interactions in-game.
In the Production Track, Flarb founder Ralph Barbagallo will discuss his platform of choice in 'Native Code is Dead: Multiplatform Development with Unity3D.' His session will cover the most popular options for developing games on mobile, web, desktop, and social platforms with particular attention spent on Unity3D, used in the company's own Android and iOS release of Brick Buddies.

Next-gen hardware talks from Sony, AMD, Oculus headed to GDC Europe 2013

Mere weeks before GDC Europe 2013, organizers review several key, next-gen and other game hardware talks scheduled for the event, including AMD on powering the graphics for PS4 and Xbox One; Sony on PlayStation 4's shading language; an HD Oculus Rift VR talk and expo floor demo; and Nintendo on Unity, HTML, and JavaScript tools.
GDC Europe will take place Monday through Wednesday, August 19th-21st at the Cologne Congress-Centrum Ost in Cologne, Germany -- just ahead of (and co-located with) the massive 275,000 person Gamescom event, with all GDC Europe passes also guaranteeing entrance to Gamescom.
In the Oculus VR session 'Virtual Reality Gaming and Game Development', founder Palmer Luckey and VP of product Nate Mitchell will speak about the challenges virtual reality presents for game devs, why VR will change the way games are played, and what VR means for the industry.
In addition, the company's product - the HD Oculus Rift VR headset - is currently planned to be playable in a booth on the GDC Europe show floor on Monday and Tuesday, August 19th and 20th, giving attendees the chance to check out the latest demonstrations on the unique hardware.
In another emerging hardware talk, Sony's Chris Ho and Richard Stenson are stepping up to present 'PlayStation Shading Language for PS4', a talk that will discuss PlayStation Shading Language, which "enables a degree of cross-compatibility with the PC, but extends far into specific PlayStation 4 hardware extensions that truly unlock features of the PS4 GPU in ways not seen before in this class of modern graphics hardware."

GDC Next reveals Double Fine, Riot notables on Board for November event

As Game Developers Conference Next session selections are prepared, event organizers have revealed the industry notables curating content - alongside GDC staff - for the future-facing conference.
GDC Next is the spiritual successor to GDC Online - the new event aims to highlight the future of video games and will take place alongside the App Developers Conference on November 5th-7th, 2013 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
GDC Next will offer six tracks that will cover new and rapidly expanding areas in video games. Event organizers have chosen 19 members for the Advisory Board with expertise in these evolving fields, including many of the key advisors from GDC Online.
The first lectures from the show, announced last month, include Google on the first year of its Play service, thatgamecompany on its design philosophy and future, Disney on theme park design lessons for game developers, and Adam Orth on reforming toxic online behavior.

Crytek, Silent Hunter Online talks late additions to GDC Europe 2013

With less than a month before GDC Europe 2013, organizers continue to highlight important talks scheduled for the event, including making the 3D rendering engine for Silent Hunter Online, Crytek's people management strategy and how to succeed on Facebook with a 'hardcore' game are late additions to GDC Europe 2013's massive line-up.
GDC Europe will take place Monday through Wednesday, August 19th-21st at the Cologne Congress-Centrum Ost in Cologne, Germany -- just ahead of (and co-located with) the massive 275,000 person Gamescom event, with all GDC Europe passes also guaranteeing entrance to Gamescom.
First up, Crytek executive producer Joshua Howard will show attendees how to apply game design to management and create more productive teams in 'Better Teams Through Game Design.'
Howard advocates people as players and not pieces in management, drawing from experience currently working on free-to-play FPS Warface and former projects such as Microsoft Flight and APB.

GDC 2014 adds board members, calls for talk submissions

The call for submissions to present lectures, roundtables and panel sessions for the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2014 is now open through Thursday, August 29.
Organized by the UBM Tech Game Network, GDC 2014 is the game industry's most comprehensive and longest running professionals-only event, where game developers converge for a week of learning, networking and inspiration. GDC 2014, the event's 27th edition, will take place March 17th-21st, 2014 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California.
The GDC 2014 advisory board is looking for Main Conference submissions for the Audio, Business, Marketing & Management, Design, Production, Programming and Visual Arts tracks. Session proposals can be submitted via the official GDC website. GDC 2014 Summit submissions will open in early September 2014.
The GDC Main Conference advisory board, which includes game industry notables such as Square Enix's Julien Merceron, PlayStation 4 lead architect Mark Cerny, Media Molecule's Siobhan Reddy and Canabalt creator Adam Saltsman, is also very excited to welcome two new members to assist in content planning for the conference.

Connecting the Global Game Development Community

GDC Vault icon
Game Developers Choice Awards icon
Independent Games Festival (IGF) icon
GameDeveloper.com icon