Everyone knows I have a love-hate relationship with GDC. If you do an ASMR whisper of GDC in my ears without a trigger warning, I will start crying and laughing hysterically at the same time. It is a complex emotional thing because GDC got me to where I am today. It also went out to get milk in 2009, and never really came back to me.
If you are looking for a coherent, balanced view of the show from a “yes and” for all parties involved, run the fuck away. This post is half warning, and half of a form asking for a DNR signature by a loved one.
How you can issue a press release where you lose ten thousand attendees out of thirty thousand attendees and attempt to say it was a solid fight and there were good people on both sides is beyond me. This is not what happened. GDC just got handed their own ass by the world, and after each disgusting bite, they are claiming it tastes delicious with hot tears streaming down their face between each painful bite.
Never has it been clearer to me that gaming is not what everyone thinks it is. We thought it was this massive community of players, publishers, marketers, and operators all joining hands and singing together to bring swipes and clicks and joy to everyone.
Instead, it is a group of people who got halfway to the heavens, building the Tower of Babel, and God just snapped his fingers, and we are no longer speaking the same language.
The only thing left to do is for all of the tribes to wander back to our mud huts, break out the smelliest hair-bag of fermented mare’s milk, and wonder what the hell went wrong.
I am not at all sorry that this is not what you expected to read, but I have let enough time pass that my take on this subject is clear.
GDC is dying.
Whether this is some phoenix bullshit, or if it’s just gam-gams running out into the street with just her knickers on after secretly not taking her medication, is all that remains to discuss.
Let’s break it down.
Here are the tribes that are politely pretending they like their relatives at Thanksgiving, and promising to behave:
The Roblox Renaissance
MobileMaxxers
WishListMeOnSteam
AAAbsolutelyInDenial
AIAIO!
I am going to have to describe each of these groups of people, even though you all should have Supreme Court Level Perception here: You know it when you see it.
The Roblox Renaissance is clear. The kids are back in the driver’s seat. This is the real meritocracy of making games now. BrainRot and Also-ran-Farmville are king. To people who “make real games,” the kids these days have invented their own language, and while everyone else wishes someone would call security, they are giggling and bouncing around the room, going “6-7! 6-7!” and laughing like it is the best thing ever. Also, if you are not fucking terrified of this already, they have their own happy meal toys more often than Mario and his Lizard-horse-tongue-fetish-mount.
MobileMaxxers are here, fighting for the last joule of energy at the heat death of the universe. They will cut you as soon as look at you. Getting squeezed between Ads and ARPU, they have seen the birth, life, and soon-to-be end of a whole ecosystem. We are Rutger Hauer, waiting to release the pigeons and fade to black. Everything is eating everything else, and in the end, only the hivemind will remain — a cacophony of angry birds meets clash of clans meets merge-two mechanics falling down a big hole in the world. If you did not understand any of that, you didn’t click enough ads, and you probably are going to play the Monopoly Go Co-op Race Game (best feature!) despite what Reddit cardmaxxers KNOW.
WishListMeOnSteam. I cannot even write this without weeping and shaking. One in three people is out of a job in the whole games industry, and they all believe that they can win the Hunger Games. Everyone is excited to be Tribute, and of the millions of games about to come out, everyone is grasping Gabe Newell’s ankles and keeping anchored to the world of Pixels-by-humans by the sheer force of will of “AI is worse than cigarettes” warnings he is slapping onto AI games on Steam. Everyone has piled into this ramshackle shed without realizing that there are six comfortable chairs and eighteen billion software developers. The music has stopped, and everyone is running to sit down. If you don’t have Jimmy McMarketing in your corner, you will get trampled in the rush to sit down and not even understand why. The worst part? Most of these trampled-on designers have great games that will never earn enough to pay back the cost of development, let alone the submission fee.
AAAbsolutelyInDenial. I am tempted to just scream ARCOMAGE and then leave you all wondering if you need to call the police or a therapist. What happens when sixteen MBA’s go through a revolving door between all of their jobs every five years and mostly spend their time day drinking under their desk? Go get a job at a publisher and find out. I am waiting for Soccer Players to become skins in the next Shooty McWar game, and I am hoping that the John Madden estate keeps his 3d model out of Fortnite on general principle. It will eventually come to that, and I am not afraid to be the first predictor. AAA is in a world of self-inflicted hurt, and sequels and remakes, and remakes of sequels will only take them so far in a world where public quarterly reporting is needed. EA at least decided to get off of that merry-go-round, and the only reason you decide to do that is you know what is about to happen to your company’s share price, and the answer is not “get another Bentley to park at the east coast summer house.”
AIAIO! is fast becoming my tribe. Automate the shit out of everything. The solopreneur is back, baby, and the sooner I can start grunting out my top three ideas that I cannot afford to pay people to build, the better. Right now, you will never find a better time to become a Will Wright, or a David Jaffe, or a Dani Bunten, or a Jon Van Caneghem. We are doing our own thing because all of our former tribes-mates hate us for the raw admission of our thirst for this moment.
If all of this sounds unnecessarily dark, it is because it is. We are living in dark times. I have jumped from tribe to tribe in games and have enjoyed the early conversations and the rise of a community and the camaraderie over the years of knowing “hey, we all make games.”
But this year felt different. When speaking with people, it was like visiting a country where you had a dog-eared translation book, and you had to slowly look up the words and point at them to each other because you didn’t know how to pronounce them.
Your brother from twenty years ago? You avoided his gaze. You don’t speak anymore, because he has a t-shirt that says “You are absolutely right! I do love AI tools!” and Mother and Father uninvited him from Christmas and Thanksgiving.
The whole thing is rocking and creaking and straining under its own weight, and it is about to collapse.
I commend the company behind GDC for publishing the stats of the show, but 30,000 minus 10,000 does not equal “thrilled.” Not even close. You earned your “Be Brave” conference scout sticker.
I get that there is military action in some parts of the world. It actually affected my GDC badge, if you can believe that. I get that some people did not come due to current administration reasons.
The size of the impact also speaks to economic shifts. I met more students and juniors at the show than ever before, and that is a good thing, but they had lots of questions. And not a lot of people had good answers.
Some people did have answers, though. I have had my potential GDC talks denied, with respectable enough reasons, revealed to me by honest and hardworking advisors, that I chose to “spite-educate” people at the show. GDC’s refusal to accept my talks did not prevent me from being one of the 4 most useful people in a room of 80 contractors and freelancers, all of whom had questions on how to succeed in today’s environment. I felt good about helping out and giving some useful information alongside 3 other generous donors of their time.
Getting back to my rant. The show has changed. We are no longer Pangea, the Earth-Continent-As-One. Maybe we should just acknowledge that. The sessions were packed with people searching for knowledge, and the young people were awesome and hopeful between moments of fear.
The show hotel lobbies were no longer elbow-to-elbow. Every time I wanted to go for a business meeting at any hotel in any direction, I could sit, hear, and talk without screaming.
The show floor? A joke. The exhibits were tiny, and instead of wrapping around to the north hall, there was “some of south hall” filled, plus three Ringling Brothers stages for the event, placed strategically to prevent the “where are all the vendors” fear sweat from showing.
All of this at the price of a week of hotel stays in San Francisco.
That is not sustainable, my friends.
There is a future change coming to GDC, after a year of radical change.
The show will probably double down on education and attendees. Surveying this young and talented crowd will make the magic eight-ball shake result in “move to a cheaper city.”
Atlanta or Chicago, take your pick.
Business Development will belong to the people of DICE. More than one person said they are only going there next year, not GDC.
The show? The floor? The exhibits? We roll the bones…
And the bones tell us… Nothing.
I don’t love that when I post about AI ideas online, I get called stupid or insane or unethical. I don’t love that everyone has dogpiled into the sea of wishlists and believes that everyone there will be all right. I don’t love that mobile consolidation is accelerating.
But all of these things are happening.
I always tell people. Today is the best time to contemplate a lifestyle making games. It is also the worst time to contemplate a lifestyle making games.
Every year that keeps getting more and more true and it is getting stretched in a line that gets thinner and thinner.
And I do not know when it will eventually snap.
See you next week.
