My Time at GDC 2024
This was my first time attending GDC. I didn’t have a direct business reason to go, so I was mostly bumming around as a tourist. Here’s a bit of a travelog.
The Roomies
Most of my time was spent slumming it with Chris and Phil. We shared a room together which was great socially and on the wallet. A lot of peers at or slightly older than myself seem to have a disdain for sharing rooms, and all the Superlayer retreats were solo-rooms. Perhaps it’s a status thing, or maybe coworkers want to keep increased separation between work and personal life to prevent their strange personal habits from becoming workplace gossip. But I actually quite prefer sharing a room. It became a start- and end-of-day nexus, where we’d usually get breakfast or dinner together and recap whatever weirdness we saw that day. We had initially hoped to podcast or play board games together but underestimated how much there would be to do. Psilocybin was surprisingly easy to obtain, but the social intensity of GDC made it a poor environment to indulge.
Game Economists
I’ve met a lot of folks digitally through the game economist cast and the little cabal that Phil brought together. My desire to meet some in-person was what pushed me over the edge to buying a plane ticket to GDC. Dario was the first one I ran into, at an embarrassingly empty SIG meeting (due to a lack of marketing), but the upshot was we got a lot more one-on-one time. He had quite a crazy backstory about running a restaurant in Thailand after graduating high school. It turned out we had some interests in common. Dario also dabbles in Smash Bros Melee with a penchant for mid-tiers like Jiggs and DK, and he is an expert on ad optimization which some games I work on have been struggling with.
Game Data Pros hosted the classiest event I saw, at a venue with classy private library vibes and waiters in dress shirts serving hors d'oeuvres and wine. Three of our previous interview guests were there (Julian, Bill, and David). I wish I had more time to chat with them, but unfortunately I had to run to the airport during the event.
Ex-Rioters
I wish I had gone up to GDC while still at Riot. While there wasn’t much reason to network up there (as there were plenty of connections to make internally), it would have been a great time to get a free trip and maybe give a talk to build clout.
Nowadays there’s plenty of ex-Riot diaspora floating around, at a variety of venture capital-backed startups or larger companies like Epic and Second Dinner. The startup folks weren’t riding the same highs anymore, but seemed to be doing alright. They got some insane valuations and fundraises around 2021, and the wise ones stayed lean and are holding onto their war chests. I heard of one startup that raised tens of millions but only has 3 employees so they stashed everything else into T-bills to get that sweet 5%. The games that rushed to launch seem to be doing so-so at best. “Just ship it” isn’t great in this environment.
I chatted up some big company ex-Rioters to scout out future job opportunities. While I’m definitely going to ride it out with Superlayer, there’s a pretty high chance I’m looking for a new job in a year or two. Many of them are rising stars at their new companies who brought in their old Riot friends to join them, so I’m hopeful. Professional networks really do matter. While I was in college, I would mock and belittle people who were crassly “networking”, but now I see the huge advantages it brings. It’s funny how much knowing a person creates a warm glow. You grow up to become what you hate, I guess.
Expo
The expo (exposition?) floor opened up Wednesday, the same day I flew out. Everyone at the expo was selling something, unsurprisingly. Web3 had a bunch of huge booths that outstripped the products they were offering, in classic “marketing-before-product” fashion. The majority of companies seemed to be selling game infrastructure to other companies, be it game engines, art assets, motion capture (“mocap”), cloud services, etc. Some were laughably bad. One booth showcased AI-generated 3D animations, where you could enter a text prompt and it would animate a 3D human. But it seemed to recycle a small set of animations and failed miserably at simple prompts like “sitting at a table”. Another company was unironically selling smell-o-vision.
A quirky indie game section showing off alternative control schemes made by student developers caught my attention. The short game demos ranged from wheelchair racing to traffic control to climbing up a ladder to wash windows. There was a fun kinetic element, but gameplay wise it felt extremely lacking. Maybe there’s a reason arcades are dying and Wii-style motion controls are abandoned.
Unions are gaining momentum, so I checked out a games union pamphlet. I saw no reason to join this one. It was almost all artists and animators, many of their complaints were about AI, and it was an offshoot of a film and theater union group. While I believe in the power of collective bargaining, this collective was not bargaining for anything that I cared about.
Next Time
GDC has created a whole ecosystem surrounding it, where offshoots host their own events and parties. Many folks come up just to conduct business meetings without ever attending GDC itself. Seeing the spectacle really gives a sense of the breadth of the industry. And of course, there are the parties.
Next time I come up to GDC, I have some items on my bucket list.
Attend an unnecessarily extravagant web3 party
Attend a chill boardgame night
Find some organized indie game events.
Try weird demos and chat up indie devs to see if my skillset can slot in
Submit a talk.
I’m not sure if I have a topic interesting and cohesive enough, but give it a shot
Carve out more time to visit non-games friends in San Fran