The 41st edition of GDC Festival of Gaming will be different from past years, with a big business hall for professionals to meet each other and one day less than usual at four days.
The event is set for March 1 to March 4, 2027 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, said Mark DeLoura, vice president of strategy at GDC Festival of Gaming, in an interview with GamesBeat.
The aim is to offer more value, access, and choice with the introduction of the Business Hall, a purpose-built home for meetings and relationship-building, as well as an expanded range of pass options (including new, lower-cost tiers) giving attendees the access they need across four focused days.
The new Business Hall accompanies the Festival Hall, attendees’ home for discovering games, demos, companies, tools, and technology. The festival is further decorated by both the 27th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards (GDC Awards; Tuesday, March 2) and the 29th annual Independent Games Festival (IGF; Wednesday, March 3), which jointly celebrate the industry’s creativity, artistry, innovation, and technical genius.
GDC Festival of Gaming won’t be just for game developers as in its early years. Rather, the event will be aimed at all game professionals, including many in marketing, publishing and the business side, DeLoura said.
DeLoura said that the team has been getting requests to shorten the grueling show over many years, and it has decided to do so this year. The show needs to change, as before the pandemic it had more than 30,000 attendees, but last year’s showing was 20,000.
DeLoura, who has been podcasting with me for a while on Fridays, said he first attended GDC in 1997 and he still loves it and it’s why he got more involved recently.
“It’s the best event for game developers globally, and so I want to be there and help make it as good as possible. The things that we made changes to this year include tightening up the event from five to four days, which is something people have asked us to do for a really long time,” he said. “(We have) more low cost options, including the business hall only and festival hall only. And the festival is getting more and more interactive over time. More community areas on it, and so we’ve got a bunch of stages on there.”
He said the team is contemplating how many stages to have this year. And it’s also considering how to make the festival hall be a place where you can meet people and discover new things, and also learn as well.
In the past, the Moscone Center was divided into three huge halls, with two of the main halls providing space for a huge expo hall. The third building had multiple levels of conference sessions and a large hall for keynote talks. Now the business hall will take up a lot of the space used in the past by the expo halls, which have had fewer exhibitors in recent years.
“We’ll have an open space where people can take meetings casually or spend time doing work. It’s an area for bookable meetings where you can register a meeting and then invite somebody to come in. Dedicated meeting rooms that can be rented per day or per hour, and then also the exec HQ area is going to move into the business hall,” DeLoura said.
This way, people won’t have to hang out as much in hotel lobbies, hotel rooms, coffee shops and run over a larger space to make their meetings, he said.
“We just just had the realization we’re just not serving this community very well. We need to invite them in. We need to give them a place. They’re out there because we don’t have a great place in here. So we’ll try and fix that. that’s the intent. So this is a pretty big space. You can think of it like not a not quite the same size as a festival hall, but really large,” DeLoura said.
DeLoura said hundreds of meetings, or perhaps 1,000, could take place at the same time in the business hall. Exactly where it will be among the three huge buildings of the Moscone Center is to be determined.
There will also be more inexpensive options this year for somebody who just wants to make use of the business hall, starting at $150. The top priced pass will grant VIP access, but it will max out at around $1,200 or so for Game Changer passes. There will be a VIP area in the business hall where people who purchase the VIP pass or qualify as VIPs can congregate. There are also lower cost passes for academics, indie startups and other categories.
“It’s still half the price that it was a couple of years ago,” DeLoura said.
There will be more categories of talks such as external development and co-development. There will also be sessions dubbed Hot Topics, which are more timely. I’m expecting to moderate a session myself with a group, and we’ll disclose that soon.
DeLoura said there will also be more focus on user-generated content such as Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite. Generative AI will also be a focus, as well as international, mobile and more.
In the past, those categories were relegate to summit programs that anchored the early part of the event. The summits included art, animation, audio and other subsectors of game development. Now there will be places where you can spend a full day diving into topics like generative AI, DeLoura said.
“We’ll have a really nice set of places for people to just hang out and take the pulse of the industry, look for new tools and technologies, and catch up with their friends,” DeLoura said.
DeLoura did not say whether there would be less overall building space used for the new GDC. The conversations continue about what to use. This means external areas like the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts may not be used as it was last year for an executive forum. DeLoura said the team will put the popular sessions into rooms that make sense.
There will be different size rooms for sponsored sessions and they will be distinct from the non-sponsored rooms.
GDC Festival of Gaming is the world’s largest professional game industry event with market-defining content for programmers, artists, producers, game designers, audio professionals, business decision makers, and others involved in the development of interactive games and immersive experiences. GDC brings together the global game industry community year-round through events and digital media, including GDC Vault, GameDeveloper.com, Independent Games Festival, and the Game Developers Choice Awards.
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