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Record-breaking GDC drew more than 24,000 game developers to San Francisco

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 2 min

The Game Developers Conference 2014 drew a record 24,000 attendees to San Francisco last week, according to show organizer UBMTech Game Network. That attendance is up about 9 percent from a year ago and reflects the growing number of indie game makers in the era of digital games.

This year’s conference featured more than 400 sessions from speakers like BioShock Infinite creator Ken Levine and Epic Games Tim Sweeney. I went for the whole week and was struck by how many of the speakers mentioned the mobile game Flappy Bird, a worldwide hit made by a single game developer in Vietnam.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.