Is GDC Over?

A Ground-Level Dispatch from GDC 2026

What’s in a name? That question’s been on my mind (and, I’m sure, the minds of many others) since October 2025, when the organizers of the Game Developers Conference (GDC), announced a rebrand. Going forward, they said, GDC would be known as the “GDC Festival of Gaming,” a bold new name that promised expansion, celebration, and a new chapter for an industry institution — the industry marquee event, considered so essential to developers that they’d often refer to it as “the pilgrimage” — as it approached its 40th year. A name is a message, a brand is a message, and the message here was nothing short of lofty and aspirational: broader perspectives, new interactive formats, more opportunities to learn and collaborate.

It also evoked in me images of E3’s final years, as it clumsily attempted to court consumers in a futile bid to retain relevance before COVID finally dealt the death blow we all knew was coming. Hold that thought for now.

Like I’ve done for quite a few years now, I just spent five days at GDC, making the daily pilgrimage from my home in the ‘burbs to San Francisco’s Moscone Center. And what I experienced was… decidedly not a festival.

I experienced a wake — albeit one where the grieving attendees haven’t entirely given up hope that the patient might still, against all odds, pull through.

I want to be honest with you about what I saw, because I think our industry deserves honesty more than it deserves cheerleading. Especially during challenging times like right now. But I also want to be honest about what gave me hope, because there was plenty of that too… perhaps just not where the organizers intended.

The Case of the Contracting Conference

Even as recently as last year, this space would’ve been PACKED, shoulder to shoulder.

Let’s start with the physical reality, because it tells the cautionary fable of GDC far more efficiently and effectively than any keynote could.

The expo floor, rebranded as the “Festival Hall,” has historically stretched across both the South and North Halls of the Moscone Center. This year, it occupied only the South Hall… and not even all of it. The space felt noticeably less crowded, both in terms of booths and the people milling about them. Major names that have been fixtures of the show floor for many years were nowhere to be seen. No Valve, for instance. No Epic, either (though they did sponsor the event, and I heard reports of Tim Sweeney ambling about, but no booth). Sony’s entire presence was reduced to a small PlayStation Indies section tucked into a corner. AWS moved offsite entirely, setting up shop in the Metreon across the street.

And that’s not even getting into what happened to the indie showcase. In past years, the indie arcade and demo stations occupied rows upon rows of floor space — a sprawling playground of experimental games and scrappy studios betting everything on a single pitch. In other words, absolute heaven for gamers and games writers like me. But this year? It was relegated to a corner of the hallway leading into the South Hall, like a literal kiddie corner. If you blinked, you missed it.

It was sad, and it was bleak. It may not be what you wanted to hear, but I’m not gonna sugarcoat this. It was quite grim.

I don’t have official attendance figures yet, but after walking the floor, my rough estimate is that this year’s conference was maybe a third the size of previous years. It’s kind of a GDC meme that the conference feels smaller each year, but this year, the difference was stark, and it was palpable. This didn’t feel at all like a festival. It felt more like a farewell tour.

The Times, They Are a-Changing

So true.

At this point, you’re probably wondering what happened, asking yourself how the mighty could have fallen so hard. And like with E3 before it, the reasons for GDC’s contraction are manyfold and multilayered, but they’re also not rocket science. In fact, you could even say they were staring us in the face all along. Hindsight, after all, is Insight +20.

Let’s start with the macro picture: the gaming industry is going through its worst stretch since the 2008 financial crisis. That’s not just my opinion, by the way — that was the consensus from multiple panelists throughout the week. And GDC’s own 2026 State of the Game Industry survey, based on responses from over 2,300 industry professionals, corroborates the metaphor. It paints a brutal picture. To start, 28% percent of respondents reported being laid off in the past two years. In the United States specifically, that number climbs to 33% — that’s one in three US gaming jobs, slashed. Half of all respondents said their current or most recent employer had conducted layoffs in the last 12 months, and among AAA studios, two-thirds had experienced layoffs. Among those who lost their jobs, nearly half still haven’t found new employment in the industry.

It’s one thing to gape at those numbers, but it’s quite another to see them manifested in the real world, in the form of all the people walking around GDC with a very particular look in their eyes — a mix of resilience and exhaustion that anyone who’s been through a layoff cycle will immediately recognize. The mood on the floor was correspondingly subdued. People were happy to see each other, sure, but the same undercurrent seeped through every conversation:

Is it getting better?

When does it get better?

I don’t want to be too much of a doomer here, as I did detect faint traces of optimism that perhaps the worst is finally over, and a slow recovery is either underway or about to begin. But “faint” is the key word there; the overwhelming mood was one of layoff-induced and -adjacent PTSD.

There was a noticeable drop in international attendance. In the months before the conference, a wave of developers from Europe, Canada, and elsewhere publicly announced they would be skipping GDC this year, for reasons both practical and political. San Francisco’s not the cheapest place to visit, after all (how the hell does a grilled cheese sandwich cost $15?! I’ll never understand that no matter how long I live in the area), and the conference’s own pricing doesn’t help (even with a restructured Festival Pass that was 45% cheaper than last year’s All-Access option). The homelessness crisis continues to be a blight on many visitors’ experience in the city. Many international developers also cited growing concerns about being able to enter (or leave) the United States, and we can argue all day long as to whether those concerns reflect reality, but the fact of the matter is that the perception is real, and in the realm of marketing and communications (which includes events like GDC), perception is reality.

But regardless of the reason(s), the fact remains that multiple well-known studios either reduced their headcounts or pulled out entirely. The international contingent, which has always been one of GDC’s defining strengths, was visibly thinner, though still more robust than one would’ve expected given everything I just mentioned. In its place, I noticed two demographic shifts: a substantially larger Chinese presence (Tencent alone ran over twenty sessions and had one of the biggest booths on the floor), and noticeably more students. Neither shift is inherently bad — Tencent is doing truly impressive work, and students are the industry’s future — but together, they signal a conference in transition, and not necessarily one of its own volition.

There were also some logistical hiccups that, while small, felt symptomatic. I couldn’t sign into the conference app until after I physically picked up my badge, which made pre-event networking nearly impossible. And my media/press per diem wasn’t accepted at first. Ultimately minor frustrations, but in a year where the organizers were selling a vision of expanded connection and community, every stumble landed that much harder.

It’s such a shocking shift that one prominent industry figure even told the press that GDC 2026 could be “the last GDC of its kind.” I’m inclined to agree, because that fully tracks with everything I saw.

AI, Robot

If there was one thematic thread running through GDC 2026, it was the industry’s deeply complicated relationship with AI.

The aforementioned State of the Industry survey not only captures this tension, it shines a floodlight on it: 36% of game industry professionals are already using generative AI tools at work, primarily for research, brainstorming, and administrative tasks. But 52% also say generative AI is having a negative effect on the industry, a figure that’s nearly tripled from 18% in just two years. Meanwhile, only 7% of responders view the technology positively. Artists, writers, and programmers are all increasingly hostile to it.

On the ground, the vibe was not quite as hostile, and instead more... ambivalent. Specifically, “survival-mode ambivalent.” And it makes sense! After all, when you’re worried about whether your studio will even exist in six months, questions like “what should we do about AI?” get filed under “problems I’d love to have the bandwidth to think about.” This precarity is, of course, upstream of the AI anxiety. But nevertheless, the anxiety is real, and people are feeling it more and more each day.

This actually made me appreciate one session I attended all the more: “GenAI at Studios: Leadership, Tools, and Trust,” featuring Mitu Khandaker, Phil Stuart, and Irena Pereira. They posited a refreshingly grounded approach for building AI workflows that teams can actually be comfortable with, don’t compromise the product’s quality, or atrophy the team’s creative muscles. Their framework was simple and smart: use AI for exploration, vision, and scaffolding, but never in the final product.

It’s a wonderfully nuanced, trust-first approach, of the kind that the industry desperately needs, and it stood in stark contrast to both the “AI will fix everything, print money, and reveal the secret of immortality” rhetoric that executives tend to default to, and the “AI is never acceptable and we will doxx you, run you out of the industry, and review-bomb your game into oblivion if you ever so much as generate an ideation image” invective from many gamers themselves.

I’ll be continuing the conversation with Phil next week. I have no doubt it will be as illuminating a chat as his presentation was.

Diamond Pickaxes in the Rough

For all of this year’s bleakness, GDC hasn’t completely lost its ability to surface a-ha moments and ideas worth paying attention to.

Sessions

The sessions, on the whole, were solid — and a few were truly excellent.

“The Global Multi-Platform Publishing Strategy of Delta Force” was a masterclass in what a deep-pocketed and well-organized publisher looks like in action. Say what you will about Tencent, and yes their scale confers many advantages denied to smaller teams, but studios and publishers of any size can learn from the operational discipline that Tencent brings to multi-platform launches, even if they’ll never replicate the Chinese behemoth’s budget and manpower.

“Publishing Realities: Funding, Discoverability, and What Success Really Looks Like” is the one I’ll be mulling over the most in the weeks to come. It was a candid, no BS discussion about what publishers actually look for, and what developers should look for in a publisher. The panel confirmed what I’ve long believed: marketing should start in pre-production, not after the trailer drops. Magic Potion Games’ Stephen MacDonald said it out loud during the session, and I even thanked him for it during Q&A. All three panelists agreed that wishlist velocity and conversion are a game’s most critical marketing metrics (because the algorithms will bury you if your wishlists don’t convert), but that revenue is ultimately the only metric that leads to sustainability. They also confirmed what everyone in the room (and the conference at large) suspected: this is the toughest funding environment since the Great Recession. VCs are still out there, and they’re still writing checks... but the bar to earn one has never been higher.

“Inside Indie (Self) Publishing” featured Finji’s Rebekah Saltsman, who clearly knows her stuff… and she endeared herself to the room by admitting she’s not even a gamer. Coming from someone with her track record in indie publishing (having brought indie darlings including Tunic and Chicory to market), that admission reinforced rather than undermined her credibility. The subtext was that you don’t necessarily have to be a player to understand players.¹ But you DO have to be curious, disciplined, and willing to let the data — and your developers — guide you.

Games

The games themselves were a mixed bag, but I did get hands-on time with several indies that I’ll be watching closely: Arcane Eats, Beat, Heart, Beat, Nocternum, and Zero Parades: For Dead Spies all showed true creative ambition and craft. Each one felt like a statement — their teams saying “we believe this is worth building” in an environment that’s giving them every reason to stop.

alt.ctrl.GDC

Just a small sample of all the wacky experimental controllers on display this year!

Finally, the alt.ctrl.GDC showcase (always a personal highlight each year) delivered its usual dose of delightful absurdity: oversized scissors you had to operate with both hands, a toothbrush paired with a mouthful of fake teeth that served as the game controller, and my personal favorite, a literal human-sized hamster ball that you climbed inside to navigate the game world.

In a year defined by contraction and industry-wide belt-tightening, alt.ctrl remains proof that game developers will never, ever stop finding bizarre and wonderful new ways to play. It’s the purest expression of what makes this industry special: the stubborn insistence on finding fun in places nobody thought to look.

Is GDC Over?

A lot of people were thinking but only whispering this at the conference, and now that it’s wrapped up, I’m seeing it increasingly spoken aloud. So I’ll add my voice to the chorus, even if it ultimately costs me my press credentials for future years: I’m not convinced that GDC survives this trajectory.

An expo that consistently filled two halls to the brim, year after year, but now barely fills one.

Major platform holders that have reduced their presence to token gestures, or moved offsite entirely.

A significant portion of the community that has decided the trip isn’t worth the risk or the cost.

Considering all these indicators, the whole “Festival of Gaming” rebrand doesn’t quite feel like the “evolution” the organizers say it is. It feels more like a Hail Mary, a hope that new branding and cheaper passes can paper over the conference’s structural and possibly terminal decline.

I wouldn’t be surprised if next year’s conference looks substantially different from years past. In fact, I wouldn’t even be entirely shocked if this year turns out to be the last one that resembles the GDC we’ve known. Discord, not GDC, may turn out to be the future of game industry networking… if it isn’t already. And Gamescom (held each summer in Cologne) is increasingly the event that international developers point to as the global industry’s new and actual hub for networking and dealmaking.

If I’d have made this prediction in 2022, when I first started covering GDC as Game & Word, I would’ve been laughed out of the gaming industry. What a difference just a few years makes.

Remember, E3 eventually died, as impossible as that might have seemed back in 2006 or even 2016. Is it really so impossible that GDC might follow in its wake? I sure hope that’s not the case, but if our worst fears come to pass, then the industry will need to figure out what replaces it — and not just for the networking, but mainly for the sense of shared purpose it provided. My first GDC, which I covered as part of Level Up Media, was nothing short of inspiring, and even motivated me to ship my own first game a few years later. I still talk to and work with the connections I made back then, who were indispensable for getting me started.

Even in its diminished state, GDC still puts thousands of game developers in the same building at the same time. That matters. Losing it would leave a huge hole that a thousand Discord servers and Zoom calls can’t quite fill.

GDC Is Dead, Long Live Gaming

But look, I don’t want to be too much of a doomer. And believe it or not, despite all of the doom and gloom — the contraction, layoffs, funding drought, and AI anxiety — I actually left GDC more committed to this industry than I was when I arrived.

Because over and over, in every corner of that downsized expo hall, I kept seeing the same thing: people who refuse to quit.

Indie developers with teams of two or three, pouring everything they have into a game they believe in, fully aware of the long odds they face and the many decks mercilessly stacked against them. Solo devs working evenings and weekends, showing up to GDC with a demo and a dream and absolutely no safety net. Studios staring down the worst funding environment in nearly two decades and still pitching publishers, still chasing wishlists, still iterating on builds.

In other words, passionate and hardworking people who are still doing the work.

Faced with crushing economics, a worsening discoverability crisis, and an imminent technological reckoning, these people still put everything on the line and dare to push their vision out into the world, purely for the love of the game — pun, as always, very much intended — and their players.

I spoke to a husband and wife team who were laid off last year, and still paid the airfare, hotel, and exhibitor fee to show off the beta they’ve been working on diligently since then. Just one game out of 20,000 that will release this year (if they’re lucky enough to release on schedule), with dwindling savings, no safety net or backup plan if they don’t beat the odds and end up like the 95% of new games that die in obscurity. And they’re still showing up, taking their shot, and (in their own little way), moving the industry ever so slightly forward.

You may think these people are crazy. You might say that about all the indie developers proudly exhibiting their games in their little neglected corner of the expo hallway, while so many of their colleagues exit the industry for bigger paychecks and greater job security.

But I beg to differ. These people are fucking heroes. If you’ve been reading this publication for any length of time, you know I don’t use either of those two words casually.

And these people give me hope, because these people are the games industry. If these are the people creating the future of gaming, then the industry’s long-term fundamentals are very strong indeed. Hell, you only have to look at this year’s release calendar to see it. Crimson Desert is shaping up to show the world that open-world action-adventure RPGs may not be so played out, after all. And GTA VI (provided it actually drops this year) is going to be nothing short of a zeitgeist-defining cultural event. The Future Games Show Spring Showcase — which, it turns out, had a live component at GDC this year (how did I miss that?) — just revealed over 40 titles spanning every genre imaginable, from co-op psychological horror to pixel-art metroidvanias set in Mexico to a musical Lovecraftian hotel renovation game (yes, really!).

While the AAA space struggles to find its footing amidst a brutal post-COVID correction, the indie pipeline (as always) is bursting with creativity, and promises to surprise and delight players with a much-needed marquee year after the fiascos that were Concord and Highguard. I’d even reckon 2026 will be as good for gamers as 2017 was. Mark my words.

No matter what growing (or shrinking) pains the industry goes through, people will always want to play a good game. The market for joy, wonder, escape, and connection will never go away.

The gaming industry is going through what might be its roughest stretch in recent history. But the people who make games — the stubborn, creative, and slightly unhinged people who keep building things despite every rational reason not to — are still here, still showing up, and still making things that matter.

My job now is to find the ones with the most promise and help them find their players. Because good games, made by good people, deserve to be played. To that end, I’m very excited to announce the founding of Spawn Point Marketing, my new marketing consultancy. Through SPM, I’ll provide affordable, fractional marketing leadership to indie and AA game studios, powered by my 15-year-long career in marketing and communications, experience building and shipping games, deep knowledge of the industry, product, and players, and deep love for the medium.

SPM will also offer easy, practical, and actionable marketing tips and data-driven case studies for FREE through its very own Substack, which you can subscribe to here (going forward, I will also publish all my industry analysis under Spawn Point Marketing, and keep Game & Word solely focused on my usual interdisciplinary academic analysis of the games themselves; so if you like the more industry-focused pieces, go ahead and subscribe to SPM while you’re here):

And if you’re an indie developer who’d like to book me for an extended engagement or half-day marketing strategy speedrun, you can do so at https://spawnpointmarketing.com

This is my contribution to the industry in these challenging times, and my way of giving back to the medium that’s given me so much throughout my entire life.

And so that concludes this year’s GDC. The conference itself may be shrinking, but the spirit of the people in it? That’s shining brighter than ever.

See you at the next one… wherever it is.

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Were you at GDC this year? Did your experience match mine, or did you see something different? I want to hear from you — drop a comment below!

~Jay

1. In abstract, this is a premise I generally am willing to entertain. That said, I will add that being a player undoubtedly helps, and a non-gamer working in the games industry is basically playing on Hard Mode. At the very least, you should play the game that you’re choosing to publish.