The DeanBeat: At 30, GDC is stronger than ever

The 30th annual Game Developers Conference takes place next week, Monday through Friday, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. For people in the game industry, the show is a kind of religious pilgrimage to get inspired about the craft of making video games. And the event is expected to break last year’s record of 26,000 attendees, according to GamesBeat’s interview with Meggan Scavio, the general manager of GDC events at show organizer UBM TechWeb.

The anticipated big crowd shows that gaming is still as hot as ever, even as the big U.S. trade show, the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), is having a harder time hanging on to its show floor exhibitors. The GDC is a smaller event than E3, targeted at the global community of game developers. Despite some ups and downs among individual companies, that community is huge. The Entertainment Software Association (the lobbying group that puts on E3) lists more than 1,641 companies in the $22 billion U.S. game industry. Overall, games have become a $99.3 billion industry worldwide, according to market research firm Newzoo. And it continues to be on the forefront of tech innovation with the emerging augmented reality and virtual reality markets.