Why are we attending events?
Game Conference Guide Insights - April 2024
Shortly after GDC I was invited to a Czech podcast Modrak & Friends moderated by my long time friend Jan Modrak to chat about GDC with another guest Lukas Kunce from Amanita Design who won IGF award for visual excellence for Phonopolis. Well deserved, the game looks absolutely stunning. We have been talking about: what, where, who, how big it is, how it is structured, and in the end, I was a struggling a little recommending going there for newcomers.
We do hear a lot about GDC; when the dates are announced, when the ticket prices are unveiled (BTW this year the price went up by 7% on average compared to last year), when something big is announced, someone makes a controversial opinion and when something horrible happens. We also do hear about how San Francisco is not safe, how the downtown area is being abandoned by retail chains, how prices for accommodation, food and drinks are expensive, not to mention the safety at plenty of social gatherings peppered around the whole week.
Sometimes just getting there is tricky. Some that travelled by Lufthansa this year got a surprising message informing them their flight being cancelled (me included). In many cases it doesn’t make sense budget wise to get there. The schedule carefully built for months will fall apart somehow with cancellations shortly before the show begins, the days are long and hectic, and you are beyond tired at the end. A lot of us (industry peeps) are flying there not to attend the conference, but to meet with others and do business with them, without supporting the conference by buying a ticket.
You may have heard that it is important to meet people in the hotel lobbies. It is true. Every half an hour people are looking into their phones and waiting for their next meeting in a choreographed dance, trying to identify the person who they never met based on a ten-year-old profile picture.
Surrounding hotels around Moscone (the venue), bars and restaurants are buzzing with people running late as they have underestimated how far the hotels are apart. You are bumping into games industry people everywhere in the city. GDC is a beast. It is also too big, overwhelming and I am not here to defend it.
Quite the opposite, I do have many concerns, yet every year, I travel there. And not just to GDC, but other staple events as well; gamescom, Reboot Develop (my alma mater), Game Days (in my home country), list goes on. But why?
PARTNER OF THE MONTH
The Middle East is the fastest-growing games market, and Dubai is the perfect access point for doing business here. On May 1st and 2nd this year, you can join a two-day b2b games industry conference in Dubai hosted by the makers of Pocket Gamer Connects, the long-running professional event series.
The games industry will come together in this vibrant, growing region so that you can meet local and global developers, publishers and investors. The conference will feature 80 renowned industry speakers from around the world, delivering talks and panels across topics such as development and monetization trends, new technologies like AI, and the growth potential of the MENA market.
The event offers unparalleled networking opportunities, with over 1,000 attendees connected through the familiar MeetToMatch meeting platform and all the usual fringe events like dedicated pitching sessions. It takes place at the Dubai World Trade Centre alongside the consumer-facing Dubai Esports and Games Festival, which you can also access with your ticket! You’ll also be able to witness the reveal on stage of the first MENA Games Industry Awards winners.
Once the recording of the podcast concluded, I was asking myself: what if my answer will discourage people to go there? My argument was to start local with smaller gatherings. Yes, you can be baptised with fire and thrown into the biggest gamedev event out there, but your chances of disappointment are pretty high. Going to any event alone is madness (And trust me, I went to massive weeklong music festival alone. It is not fun).
The interactions with others will make or break your event experience. Every event.
My goals will differ from yours, and my event experience will be completely different from what you have seen, eaten or heard. My priority is to make friends, professionally, as my teammate described it. And that can be only done via meaningful interactions, conversations, listening and contributing to the dialogue.
It is sharing a pastry with a friend and recording a line to a podcast on a park bench (hey Brendan!) It is waking up early, walking few blocks and eating dim sum for breakfast with likeminded people and on the way back discussing the current state of the industry (cheers Maarten & Ralph). It is spending your afternoon walking after a delicious lunch to pier, and play some Galaxian in an old arcade (hey Charles & Nina). It is test driving a new hardware gadget that I want buy, as it is enhancing the gameplay with tactile experience. It is looking at sometimes weird and highly ambitious games during a developer walkthrough night (SF Moma & Horses FTW!) It is bumping into a stranger who in the end worked on your favourite game in the world. It is a hug in the middle of crossing while running opposite directions for a meeting (Thank you, Jeff). It is sitting down with a friend who is no longer in the games industry and talking about opportunity that brought us together but never materialized. It is the realization you have met your business twin over a pint of beer. It is slowing down and giving your friends a breather with a donut.
This can be description of every event out there, and not even the one from this year.
Running late, having to juggle schedule as some meetings were cancelled and your day is falling apart, trying to accommodate someone you haven’t seen for ages, adding plus 1 to a table booked ages ago, missing a presentation, phone dying, that is part of it as well. What I am talking about is the unplanned, unscheduled, serendipity. And it repeats itself, each year with different flavour, affecting your event experience.
For me personally, events are defined by this. Making an acquaintance and developing it into relationship that leads to friendship with true connection through mutual experiences. It takes effort and years to develop. Why I would love to attend talks and play games at events, I am getting more from conversations and meeting with interesting new people. They will introduce you to their friends. And with a larger network you won’t be feeling lost or alone.
There is always someone who knows someone, or someone you never met before. This is the hidden magic; this might be the silver bullet.
But you can’t bet on it, on serendipity. It won’t help build you a case, justify the travel budget nor create a solid building block for advancement in your career. You can help it though, by continuing building your network and work on your relationships. And that you can do it by interacting with others at events.
See you soon!
[Game Conference Guide is tracking games industry & game developers events, trade shows, festivals, conferences and events around the world.]
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Pavol Buday, curator @ GCG