GDC 2025
I had not been to GDC in about 10 years, and last time I went it was sort of as a "Victory lap" after having gone about twice before during game design school. In the early days game companies had booths and really good free stuff. Blizzard and Activision in particular had pretty impressive booths. You could hand over a paper resume to someone, and you might talk with a recruiter in person. I didn't have much experience back then so all of my efforts to get a job failed.
10 years later and I had a free Expo pass, a normally $350 expense, from an internet friend. Airfare to SF was pretty cheap, and while the free housing I had lined up fell through, I found the Motel 6 in the Tenderloin District was about my only affordable option. So I pulled the trigger. I was starting a new job in a few weeks and hadn't left Seattle in months, so I was due for some kind of adventure.
GDC Was and Remains a prohibitivly expensive endevore. You are basically spending a new computer's worth of money to be in the most expensive city in America for an entire week. That price means that every action and meeting and talk you go to is filled with "could I be doing something more valuable right now?" feelings. You inevitably miss something big and memorable. The combination of huge business happening around you, indifferent to your own situation, makes the entire thing feel very alienating to a lot of people.
GDC is also I think one of the few professional confrences in the world where marginalized and outsider developers are side-by-side with incredibly deep pocketed corporations. The Expo floor has student made games on display next to huge and expensive booths for Amazon AWS.
Making face to face connections with people and building relationships through the week by hanging out and talking is by far the biggest value of the conference. I met multiple people from the Seattle area and caught up and saw multiple other of my Seattle area game dev friends - all of us are too busy to meet in person in Seattle but within the magic of GDC all we have is time.
Because of the expense of GDC and the number of developers in the area, a lot of the more valuable events are outside and unaffiliated with the conference. I went to Slug World - a DIY punk event in Oakland - for a single day. I met future coworkers and a few more people at the Systems Designer Meetup.
Yerba Buena Gardens ends up being the "it" spot all weekend, and the number of people streaming in and out means that making specific plans to meet with people is almost not needed, you'll run into them a few times a day. I had breakfast with someone I met at the Systems Design Meetup a few days prior because they wandered into the same cafe as me. I scheduled two specific meets with people mostly because I didn't know what they looked like and wasn't sure how busy both of them were. I scheduled parties in the evenings to give myself a fallback plan in case something more interesting didn't happen, but it usually did.
I would call Soma District's DNA Lounge "Moscone Very South" because I was there multiple times that week going to shows or parties. One night was Goth Night (Death Guild) and the next the entire venue was crowded with game setups and gaudy signs for the sponsors - Reddit and Unity - hanging over everyone like the sword of damacles. The pizza at the DNA is the best in the city.
I did experience FOMO after the IGF awards and a very large pizza meal, I went back to my hotel instead of going out longer because I was tired and my voice was shot - but I missed a better night at the DNA lounge and Karaoke, which is my bloodsport. I chalked this up to being the enevitable thing I miss every year.
Many of the parties I went to were LGBTQ+ centric. There was a gay games showcase at a gay bar, and Sony threw an event in the Castro district. There was also a zero alcohol table top games party I walked into, and I appreciated the Ginger Beer very much after so many nights of $10 white claws. I was given a steel tumbler at that event, which was valuable as my hotel room didn't have any cups.
There was so very little in the way of cool free stuff at the expo. Discord had a free merch drawing, and I got a pin and bumper sticker out of it, other people got keyboards and plushies. I saw some lightsabers carried by a few people at one point. In years past people would brag about bringing an extra bag just for free stuff. There's no more shirts anymore. Or hoodies. I did not need more stuff to haul home.
By the time Friday rolls around the expo closes 3 hours early, and the afternoon has a distinct Last Day Of School feeling to it where people are saying goodbyes. See you laters become goodbyes. Contacts are exchanged one last time. The conference badge gets de-equipped one last time. etc.
I will say the conference is prohibitivly expensive. Not just the passes, which can be thousands of dollars, but the hotels and airfare. And in san francisico's conference center neighborhood things are incredibly expensive, so you are deploying a firehose of money at all times of the day. the conference nickles and dimes attendees - $50 for a few hours for "GDC Nights" or several hundred dollars for GDC vault access so you can see a video archive of the presentations. Most of the interesting talks are paywalled behind the passes that cost $1500 or more. You are not getting into those unless you know someone, or got an IGF nomination. The worst value is the "student expo" pass which lets you into the expo floor on the last day, and there are no companies actually hiring anymore, and the expo closes 3 hours early. Yet still these passes sold out. There's no incentive for the organizers to make things better for attendees, multiple pass prices makes the entire value proposition very muddy, and because most of these things are expensed or comped by the majority of the corporate backed attendees I dont see things changing. it's always someone else's money.
But the real value remains the people, and those people are often sneaking in via help from friends or special deals or both. I think the expo pass (comped) along with a cheap hotel and flight is the best way I've experienced the GDC. There's this feeling that you're getting away with something which is always fun.
I have no ending thoughts, but I should hit publish before I forget to.