Latest News

Hello and welcome to the 19th annual Independent Games Festival Letter From The Chairperson!

I wanted to take a moment to thank the IGF staff, developers, judges and jury members who were supportive and active in my first year as IGF Chairman! It was great to work through the process from start to finish and I appreciate all the feedback, conversations and suggestions that came along from everyone throughout the year.

Also, a big congrats again to all the teams who were nominated, received honorable mentions or won awards last year!  It was an amazing selection of games that I feel not only echo the voices of our community, but also reflect how far we’ve all come as an industry. I’m really looking forward to discover what this new year has in store!

Based on the experiences of last year, (and since there’s always room for improvement) we’ve decided on some changes to this upcoming IGF. I’ll outline the more notable items below in more detail.

Later this year San Francisco will play host the first standalone Virtual Reality Developers Conference, and among the great sessions organizers are lining up for the show is an expert talk on how VR devs can create mixed-reality trailers.

Delivered by game trailer wizard Kert Gartner, the "Behind the Scenes: Making Mixed Reality Trailers" session at VRDC 2016 promises a cutting-edge look at some of the best techniques and technologies for creating mixed-reality video of your augmented- or virtual-reality experiences.

This is something he know something about, having collaborated on the great mixed-reality trailer for Northway's Fantastic Contraption VR.

It's important because explaining VR experiences to people who haven't tried them is proving exceedingly difficult, and mixed-reality trailers can help you overcome that challenge by effectively conveying what it's like to be inside a VR experience.

With GDC Europe 2016 just weeks away, know that conference organizers have lined up a great session from Playfab's Mark Val about all the ways you can creatively improve your games' backend ecosystems.

In his talk, "Expanding Your Creativity Within the Backend Services Ecosystem," Val will take you on a tour of the leaders of the backend services ecosystem and how they can help you make better games.

From multiplayer, game design, monetization, analytics, support tools and more, attendees of his talk will learn new ways to expand their backend services and use them to be more creative when making games.

It promises to be a useful talk for anyone who helps make games, from indie devs to big-time publishers. Don't miss it!

Good news, game makers: UBM Tech Game Network, the organizers of the Game Developers Conference 2017, are now accepting submissions to present lectures, roundtables, panels, posters and tutorials through Thursday, August 18th.

This will be the 31st edition of GDC, which continues to be the world's largest and longest-running event serving professionals dedicated to the art and science of making games.

GDC 2017 will take place Monday, February 27 to Friday, March 3, 2017 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California, and will once again host thousands of game developers from all around the world for a week of learning, networking and inspiration.

For the main conference, the GDC Advisory Board is considering session submissions for seven tracks: Audio, Design, Production, Programming, Visual Arts, and the Business, Marketing & Management track, as well as the track on Advocacy, which covers social issues from diversity to quality of life. Proposals can be submitted via the official GDC website.

Most developers think of a remote contractor as an outsourced entity working on a very concrete and specific aspect of a game.

But at GDC Europe in Germany next month, Io-Interactive producer Markus Friedl and Mi'pu'mi Games CEO Gregor Eigner will take the stage to showcase how the intense collaboration on Hitman taught the developers that with the strong vision of the stakeholders and the setup of an intertwined working environment, a distributed team can do much more than just outsourcing work. It can act as an embedded team.

GDC Europe attendees will have a chance to sit in on their talk, "Working with an Embedded Team on Hitman," and hear the pair earnestly discuss the vision, the setup, the problems and the possible next steps of such a collaboration.

They'll cover each aspect from the (often significantly different) angles of the two collaboration partners and therefore provide learnings and insights to both representatives of larger, publisher-owned studios as well as smaller, independent game development teams. It should be a great talk!

With the big GDC Europe 2016 August conference in Germany just around the corner, organizers want you to know that show attendees will have a chance to catch a great talk from Hi-Rez Studios exec Todd Harris about how the studio succeeded when it went all in on eSports with its popular MOBA Smite.

Harris is chief operating officer at Hi-Rez, and in his talk "Smite & HiRezTV: Going All in on Video and eSports for Community Growth and Retention" he'll explain how the company used video content marketing and eSports to help grow Smite to over 20 million players.

Video marketing required only a small budget to get started but has since scaled to large event broadcasts with multi-million dollar budgets, according to Harris. To wit, attendees of his talk will walk away with a better understanding of video content marketing and how it shapes a game as an eSport.

Furthermore, they'll gain insights on the importance of using video to market their own games or identifying publishing partners who use video to grow and retain community. Don't miss it!

To better understand the state of the European game industry ahead of GDC Europe, Game Developers Conference officials have surveyed over 800 European games industry professionals who have attended a past GDC event.

The data gathered from that survey has now been compiled into the fourth annual GDC Europe State of the Industry report, and it offers both an interesting snapshot of the European game industry as it stands now and some perspective on how it has changed over the past year.

Yesterday, we shared some highlights from the report that showcased how PC and mobile still reign as the top platforms European developers make games for -- but interest in VR is rising fast.

Today, we dig even deeper into the survey results and share some data on how respondents feel about the perennially popular topic of tax incentives for game development in Europe.