QUO VADIS, GDC?
Game Conference Guide Insights - APRIL 2025
Oh please not another hot take on GDC! I hear you. We have seen the beloved conference moved to Austin, Seattle, Las Vegas, six feet under with deserted expo floor & silenced meeting area, we screamed collectively and proudly we are not supporting the event by buying a ticket, measured the success of 2025 edition based on the number of parking spots, people in the lobbies, lanyards on the streets, yet Informa (owner of GDC) posted the conference attracted nearly 30,000 attendees. Same as last year.
Now, where they were, I do not know. I was not in the attendance (because restructure), and I just realized I should tone down my snarky commentator's voice. You see, I was reading a little bit about Informa, went through their financial statements and was looking into attendance of other events they have in their portfolio.
Informa is a massive corporation, they have bought UBM (another corporation and previous owner of GDC) in 2018 for eye watering 3,8 billion dollars. Their portfolio is divided into six divisions and one of them is Festivals, currently not tracked in their annual financial reports. Part of Festivals are 10 brands including Cannes Lions (Marketing), Money 20/20 (Fintech), London Tech Week, Africa Tech Festival, ATX (Tech), Black Hat (Cyber Security) & finally GDC (Gaming).
GDC is one of the biggest events they have and it is the largest among the Festival division based on the number of visitors, followed by Black Hat, ATX and London Tech Week. This September the crown might be taken by Money 20/20 expecting to attract 45,000 visitors at their premiere event in Riyadh, a flagship event in the territory where Informa smells a lot of money.
Next year, we will have visibility on how much revenue the Festival division is bringing to the bank. Informa boasts double digits growth with revenues for 2024 exceeding 3.5 billion GBP (compared to 3.1 billion GBP in 2023).
Collectively all events in the Festival division are platoing as they post the same numbers as the year before (= not a good indication). And investors like to see the numbers go up.
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Why is this so important? Well, many were saying GDC will face the same destiny as E3. It might be true, I do not see it happening anytime soon. E3 was not owned by a corporation with a massive portfolio of large scale events while successfully operating around the whole world and catering to other industries. On top, E3 faced a generational shift similar to what traditional media faced when let’s plays exploded and we stopped reading the news.
Disclaimer: I do not have any affiliation with GDC, I know few individuals who were running it before UBM snatched it and I managed to support Slovak Game Developers Association with free passes through scholarship programme.
We can look at GDC from many different angles. I do feel it outgrew its values, goals and community needs. It is still an institution and a destination event with such a huge gravity well, that nothing else matters in March and it seems everyone will go to San Francisco.
Similar to E3, look how Summer Game Fest shaping up its brand, and expanding their broadcast by adding media days for publishers & media and this year throwing in B2B offering with help of Christopher Dring. Cant wait to see what the team will bring with The Game Business LIVE.
I am not here to defend GDC either, the event has its own caveats and I do agree with many bringing forward safety, increased pass prices, quality of food and predatory hotel room rates.
Let's start with the venue. Moscone is a super modern conference center, owned by the City and County of San Francisco. It is not privately owned. They are renting it with incentives directly from public funding. The city itself wants to have huge crowds around as it brings cash to the coffers from hotels, restaurants and other services. They will do everything in their power to extend the agreement which should expire next year.
Of course, even though the Moscone is public, the rents are not publicly available.
Even if you would change the venue, Informa would negotiate with state, county, municipality and city to get the rents as low as possible, because they are bringing the “value” and they want to extract it from the attendees. And they are so big, their negotiation power is immense.
And don’t get me wrong, cities compete to get events like GDC. Informa is definitely looking at other options, as the venue rentals and affiliated services went up alongside with utilities and workforce. As every big company in the games industry they are looking to reduce overhead, cut costs, and they will go whenever a better option is offered.
Informa exists to make investors happy and to extract value from the brands, attendees, speakers, community, volunteers, staff, compensation for speakers, IGF finalists etc. Informa is not a games business. They do not care about the games industry, what is happening within it and what challenges we are facing together. To quote their financial report, what they care about the most is to: “consistently delivering 5%+ underlying revenue growth, underpinned by a market-leading B2B platform, world class B2B Brands and a decade of focus on the geographic growth markets of the world.”
It is very naive to think the prices for hotel rooms in other cities wont be spiced up, and I can bet if the move happens to another location, there will be a lot of voices saying: lets wait and see how the new edition will pan out and then we wont be buying a ticket, because we will have meetings in nearby lobbies.
Informa is a publicly traded company, so the ticket prices won't go down. They will go up. What they might do is freeze some of the not popular tiers, to keep the loudest group quiet a bit. Expo passes this year were 25% more expensive than last year. They have increased the prices by 12% across all the tiers compared to last year.
I want to touch upon the number of attendees as well. You can cook numbers in multiple creative ways and a lot of events are guilty of it. I am not saying GDC is doing it. You can take for example number of sold Summits Passes and multiply them with the length of the event in days, you can count the number of visits to the venue itself. You can take the prediction and pretend this was the amount of visitors in the attendance.
Last year, we saw a 10% decrease among the exhibitors and this year they omitted to mention it in the press release. In all likelihood the numbers went down a bit, which is the result of cost cutting and companies spending on events in general.
GDC is a victim of its own success. It is too big to change quickly (same as E3), and it will hurt them in the long run as the big players are either nowhere to be seen, or they are throwing satellite events in nearby hotels or full blown conferences like Nvidia with their GTC in nearby San Jose. And this won't change. Companies like to control the narrative and the space they invite a certain number of people they want to interact with.
We all know the GDC Nights is just a duck tape and trying to capitalize on those that are not buying tickets and create FOMO around networking events. Not sure how it was, but clearly this is a response to mixers happening around the city. I like the concept of GDC Nights, but with a $75 entry fee you can't cover drinks nor food for your guests, what numerous parties are doing.
Speaking about meeting places, MeetToMatch is killing it and sucking all air. You can't go head to head with the most popular meeting system, when yours is abysmal and no one is using it. And GDC is not alone, gamescom is facing the same issue.
I really do not know where GDC is heading, or how hard it is for the board to convince the owners, but we will see cutting corners on services, quality of the production (already visible on the Expo floor since 2022 edition) and service on-site, budgets for the supporting programmes, and of course increasing number of sponsored sessions. The 2025 edition featured 182 out of 751 sponsored sessions and summits, a staggering 24% (6 sessions were cancelled). Let that number sink in.
🏆New Deadlines on the horizon
Deadline: 9 Apr, on-site showcase + Steam event, entry: from 3000€ per booth
Steam Next Fest: June
Dealine: 29 Apr, Steam Event, entry: freeXP Indie Game Showcase
Deadline: 30 Apr, on-sise showcase, entry: freeIndie Showcase @ Develop Brigton
Deadline: 2 May, on-site showcase, entry: free
Game Discover Exhibition
Deadline: 11 May, on-site showcase, entry: freeSelected Indie 80 @ Tokyo Game Show
Deadline: 16 May, on-site showcase, entry: free
Deadline: 31 May, on-site showcase, Steam event, entry: free
Deadline: 2 Jun, virtual showcase, Steam events, entry: $75 - $125
Get all deadlines here.
And that is it for this month.
Next week I am travelling to Dubrovnik for Reboot Develop Blue, I will be part of multiple panels and on top will host annual painting mini figures.
As always, if you want to meet, just let me know.
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Pavol Buday, curator @ GCG