“Everything’s changing in the industry and we need to change as well”: inside the new-look GDC
The only time Mark DeLoura’s cheery demeanour dips is when I ask him about the teaser campaign. The news that the Game Developer’s Conference was becoming the “GDC Festival of Gaming” was announced with CGI teaser videos showing the previous logo being destroyed, which attracted an almost entirely negative reaction from across the industry. It’s clear this took a toll.
“I think if people are talking about your ads, you’ve done something right,” he says, carefully. “And as a long-time GDC attendee and advisory board member, seeing a giant robot step on a GDC sign tweaked something in my heart. But at the same time, we really needed to get the message across that this is not the same old GDC. That worked.”
The campaign signalled that change was coming, but nothing more, leading to extensive speculation that GDC was aiming far beyond its traditional audience and into the consumer space. Last week came confirmation that it wasn’t – and in fact, the show isn’t changing nearly as much as expected. The traditional content is now spread over a full week and accessed by a Festival Pass ticket nearly half the price of previous All Access passes, while a new Game Changers pass adds new features aimed at more senior figures.
DeLoura, who’s still a relatively recent arrival at GDC parent Informa, has been in the show’s orbit for a long time. He still owns the encyclopedia-sized show directory from his first visit in 1997, before a career that took him to senior roles at Sony, Ubisoft and Google. Having joined as Executive Director for Innovation and Growth, he’s familiar both with GDC’s storied history and its more recent status as the subject of regular criticism. His enthusiasm for the show’s legacy and the benefits of the connections it enables is tempered by an understanding of the ongoing complaints around its price and its location.
Over an extended conversation before the changes were announced, he pitched a vision of GDC that takes up more of the city and serves a wider spread of the increasingly battered games industry. The following answers have been edited for length and clarity.
When the teaser campaign came out, lots of people were concerned that “Festival of Gaming” meant you would be targeting consumers. You aren’t, so what makes it a festival?
The festival part of the GDC Festival is that we’re broadening out what the conference is and does, but not into a consumer space. It’s still by developers, for developers, focused on developers. I think the distinguishing features of it are going to be that we’re going to embrace the city in a different way than we have before. So we’ve been kind of boxed into West, North and so on. Now that we’re going to spread out and try to also be in the hotels.
We’re going to have events in Yerba Buena, we’re going to have pods over at the Yerba Buena for Game Changers. There’ll be a dedicated floor for Hospitality Suites in the W for executives to take meetings in, like NDA rooms if they need those. There’s actually some really cool stuff in the works that I hope lands, but that’ll be in other buildings close by. But the idea is to make it a celebration of development versus walking into the building and sitting in the rooms and that’s all we’re doing.
It’s always said that deals get done in the bar at the W. Does that mean you’re laying claim to that space? Will people need to have the Game Changer pass in order to get into the W and have that sort of conversation?No, no. There are some dedicated spaces that we’re going to take over, but all of the spaces that have been there in previous years are still going to be the same. I think there’s cabanas in the W Hotel. They were big hits. I’ve certainly spent many a late night there. That will still be the same.
The cost of attending GDC is a perennial source of complaint. Do you think the Festival Pass pricing addresses that?
I feel like the more people who have conversations with more people at the show, the better off we all are. So we want to invite those people in. Having a reduced cost is going to help that, though for people who aren’t local, probably the travel and hotel are the major part of what they’re paying. But by cutting the price of the main festival by 45% and then making it be a full week long, essentially the festival pass is the All Access pass of the previous year minus the GDC Vault and it’s almost half price. We really hope that that enables people to sign up for that, and then they’ll come in and we can all have conversations together.
The game industry is going through these really terrible couple of years and everything’s changing in the industry and we need to change as well. But the reaction against things changing just in life, I think, is you can either put up walls or you can reach out and work together. And we see different people do different things – in the world at large and governments at large – and I think GDC is all about embracing, reaching out, communicating, learning from each other. It’s kind of special that way. For 40 years now it’s been that way.
“The game industry is going through these really terrible couple of years and everything’s changing in the industry and we need to change as well.”
Is the Game Changer pass more expensive because it’s a premium package for those less budget constrained?
It’s more comparable to where All Access was in previous years. It includes the year of the GDC Vault and the Luminaries speaker program and access to the pods over in Yerba Buena if you need to have meetings. I feel like a lot of people who probably are going to be appropriate for Game Changers are folks who are running from hotel room to hotel room showing off their game. And so if we can provide them a spot, it’s easier for them to have meetings like, great, we’re trying to solve problems.
So the bedrock GDC content we’re used to will remain in the Festival Pass?
Yes. What’s going to be fun about the content this year is that we have the same amount as before, but we’re trying to break apart the established pattern. Traditionally GDC talks are panels or micro talks or lectures, maybe some round-tables, and there’s a broader world than that out there.
We can do fireside chats. We’re looking into how we do keynotes again, we’ve been talking about having debates, which we never have really done, but other shows do successfully and we are looking into that. Just let’s try some things this year and see what people like. I think GDC has gotten into a pattern. Patterns are great, but we got to try new stuff.
What sort of speakers will be on the Luminaries Speaker Series?
I think of it as speakers that are speaking to executives. So the speakers may be executives, but they may also be analysts, investors. The kind of DICE talks that really stick with me have been from other industries that maybe utilize game technology, but it’s not a talk about game technology – it’s a talk about creativity or it’s a talk about good ways to invest into building your teams. We’re exploring all sorts of stuff right now, but learning from each other, learning from other industries, I think is super fascinating.
Somebody described what we’re trying to do the other day as “like TEDxGDC”. That doesn’t quite capture it, but it makes me think about it in a different way than it was before.
Who do you see as that audience for that?
I think of it as: directors of studios and up. If you’re managing groups of people or you’re managing managers of groups of people, you’re probably the right person. We’re trying to figure out how to help this group of people who are maybe studio heads, or VPs at studios, or tech directors, production directors. They’re working on the game, but they’re also working on how the game is built, how the game is communicated to people, how they’re financing the game.
How are you changing the content lineup for the Festival Pass?
The previous separation of summits and cores doesn’t make sense. That sort of evolved over time. But we still see the value in what the summits were and that for community building, they were amazing. So the question for us is, okay, so everybody’s going to be able to come all five days, but how do we still get that summit vibe? So we’re trying to spread the content of the summits across the week and do them kind of in chunks. In the initial parts of the week it’s more about meeting people, in the middle maybe it’s about the work that you’re already doing, towards the end it’s about how your work is cross-discipline with some other part of the studio that you work in, and conversations around that. This is all a work in progress. And a crazy spreadsheet problem.
Are you broadening the topics covered to appeal to more people?
We’re moving from people who are actively working on the game itself to people who are working to support the game. These days I don’t differentiate when I say the word “developer” between the person who’s doing the sales and marketing and the person who’s doing the QA and the person who’s writing the code. We’re all developers. I think the conference traditionally has focused on the people who are building the thing, and what we want to do now is focus on the ecosystem. So we’re broadening it out that way and trying to invite more people in.
What a developer is has changed over time. We’ve talked about executives and marketeers. You can also think about people who are building Fortnite creative games, or Roblox games and Minecraft games. At what point are those people also developers? And we want to have them incorporated into the community as well. These are the conversations we need to have at GDC. That’s what GDC is for.
I’d also say that games have gone to other places. I spent the last ten years working in education, but using games technologies. The people at Tesla notoriously hired game developers to help build their dashboard. People at the Nordstrom or Macy’s here, they’re using a game engine to give an idea of how you’re going to look in a particular outfit without putting it on. The people who are using all this stuff that we built in the game industry, we should be having conversations with them.
California is less the center of the gaming industry than it used to be. Was it ever an option to have it anywhere else? When you’re looking at reinventing it as a festival, are there better cities for that?
It’s always a conversation. The advisory board is 50 super smart game developers, and we meet up in September every year, and every year people are concerned about costs and travel. I think San Francisco is arguably still the home of game development in the US, although you could make a good argument for Los Angeles too. Seattle’s an up-and-comer.
What’s important is that we’re serving the community, and so we need to continue talking with the community. I look at other conferences and you see other models – SIGGRAPH bounces around. Gamescom now has three different locations around the world. Sibling events hosted by Informa like Black Hat, they move around.
San Francisco has been an amazing partner, and I lived in San Francisco for years, so I love having to go back, but then I go buy a sandwich and pay $25 and I’m like, wait a minute. For an indie game developer or somebody who’s making a Roblox game, the idea that they’re going to come in and spend five days there and do the travel, it’s rough. We have to keep an open mind on these things.
People have long been vocal about the costs of attending GDC. Have you seen that reflected in attendance data, or speaker applications?
The numbers have been pretty consistent in terms of number of attendees, definitely in terms of the number of speakers. But concerns about costs, they’re always super valid. Concerns people bring up around international visitors coming to the US, super valid. We’re getting this whole process off a little bit earlier than normal for a bunch of reasons, but one of the pleasant side-effect reasons is giving international people more time to work out visas and things like that. I think one of the huge values of the conference always has been the international attendance, being able to communicate with outsource partners or learn about design and story from another culture. We really have to find ways to encourage that. We’re going to do what we can.
“I worked in the White House, but the people who I worked with, they’re not there anymore. The people who are there are not taking my calls.”
I appreciate there’s the macro bit you can’t really do anything about.
Yeah. I worked in the White House, but the people who I worked with, they’re not there anymore. The people who are there are not taking my calls. I can’t help on that front.
What’s the thinking behind the networking platform?
We’re going to try to take a crack at curated networking this year. We haven’t completely nailed all this down yet… If there are people who have really targeted needs that week and we can help them through some kind of curation, we should try that. Especially for people who are super time constrained or executives who are looking for the best indie games. Maybe we can help introduce them to indies that they wouldn’t have met otherwise. The networking is a big part of what we’re bulking up on this year to try to help out.
The curated networking thing is part of the Game Changers package. Does that mean you’re starting with the top end for that one? Is it focused on the execs?
Honestly, I think this is still pretty in flight as well. I can say for Game Changers you’ll be signed up for Game Plan, that’s the name of the system. The contemplation now is: are there other people who should get access to that too? How can we make this valuable? What’s the right way to do it?
We’re trying to learn from other events about what works well. Our community is really different, though. We’ve got somebody on board who has done these kinds of programs for other conferences and I’ve been really heartened that they came in, I had an initial conversation with them, and then two weeks later they came back and were like, “holy cow, that game industry is really different.” I was like, yep, that’s why I’m glad we’ve got an expert in you. We’re going to work this out together.
It’s always a conversation and there will always be some people who are unhappy.
People can be mad at the choices that we make. We just have to try to understand where they’re coming from and I hope that they understand where we’re coming from and just trying to make the right choices to support these systems. I think it’s been a long-term conversation arc for me because I was involved when SIGGRAPH started incorporating game technology, and SIGGRAPH is basically a nonprofit trying to support itself through their conference. So the pricing structures that they have are designed for that, and the size of the conference is designed for that. Having a nonprofit based conference versus having a corporate based conference, there’s different incentives for growth for each of those. There’s different focuses.
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