This year’s Game Developers Conference will reflect its growth from an event with humble beginnings in a San Jose living room to a Moscone Center staple.
The 38th edition of the video-game industry conference runs from March 18-22. Moscone Center has hosted GDC since 2007, save for a virtual event in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. This year’s event also marks a long-awaited return to form for organizers, who said the event is returning to pre-pandemic attendance levels. Roughly 30,000 attendees and more than 300 sponsors and exhibitors are expected.
In terms of total hotel nights, GDC is The City’s fourth-largest conference, according to the San Francisco Business Times. The San Francisco Travel Association, which books Moscone Center, said it estimates that the conference will generate $40.6 million in economic impact, which includes local spending by attendees, event planners and exhibitors.
The City has fewer conventions booked this year than it did in 2023, which was also below pre-pandemic levels, thus making the conference all the more important for the local hospitality and tourism industries.
“This year more than ever, there's a big focus on bringing the community together and celebrating where we've been, and then where we are now then also what's to come,” Stephenie Hawkins, GDC’s director of event production, told The Examiner. “I think GDC is such a good place for that.”
After last year’s event focused on the future of the gaming industry, organizers said this year is all about preserving the history of the conference and games. This edition is tapping into the GDC Vault, an archival video platform that has saved over 20 years of content from past conferences, and the Gama Archive, which stores media coverage from previous years.
Both of those projects, Hawkins said, tie nicely to one of GDC’s main features on the show floor: the Game History Gallery. Made in partnership with the Video Game History Foundation, the exhibit will allow attendees to play and learn about games from lesser-known developers. It will highlight games with interesting features or mechanics that were overlooked by the industry. Organizers are also encouraging attendees to bring their own games and hardware for preservation.
The conference also features guided walking tours around The City. Neighborhoods near Moscone Center, such as the Embarcadero, SoMa, the Financial District and Union Square, have been divided into zones where attendees can meet up, travel to and from the conference, and explore San Francisco in their free time.
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“It's a small city. It's only 7-by-7 square miles, and you can traverse the entire city and experience a diverse set of neighborhoods in one day,” Ashley Corrigan, GDC’s senior conference producer, said.
“When you meet people that you know and you meet buddies that you can do that with, it just feels a lot more accessible to do that than if you were going by yourself,” she said.
Also new to this year’s conference is The Developer’s Concert on the GDC main stage, co-hosted by Troy Baker, a voice actor known for his work as Joel in “The Last of Us” video-game franchise. The San Francisco Conservatory of Music will play medleys of scores created for video games. The show, conducted by longtime video-game composer Austin Wintory, will feature music nominated for Grammys and games-industry awards.
“Having SFCM students and faculty play at the award ceremony this year is such a fantastic way to highlight the rich diversity of talent not only at the conservatory, but also in the local Bay Area music scene, since many of our musicians are based here,” Steven Horowitz, the executive director of SFCM’s technology and applied composition program, said in a statement.
GDC will also celebrate the 10th anniversary of its “alt.ctrl.GDC” showcase, in which students demonstrate video games that they’ve created using unconventional controllers. Players control their movements with a skateboard in one game, while another involves fire that “our operations team spent a lot of time on getting approved with the venue,” Hawkins said.
Organizers noted that in the span of the past year, the video-game industry has been rocked by a steady stream of layoffs. Those dismissals, they said, make this edition crucial in bringing developers together and showcasing their contributions to the industry.
“More of us are coming back together gradually,” Corrigan said. “You're seeing more and more of that excitement and that remembrance of how nice it is to be with your community.”
