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Welcome to the GDC Festival of Gaming! Hosted by GDC’s Natalie Sam (Marketing Director) and Sam Warnke (Conference Producer, Curated Program), this essential crash course is designed to help you make the most of your GDC experience. You’ll learn strategies that work: choosing the sessions that matter to you, mastering the Festival Hall neighborhoods, and hearing personal tips and practical advice to set you up for success.

From understanding what's new with the GDC Festival of Gaming to navigating Moscone Center like a seasoned pro, this session gives you the confidence and knowledge to approach each day with purpose. Whether you're new to GDC or returning after our evolution, you'll leave knowing exactly how to navigate the week ahead.

Grab a board game and let the games begin! Stop by the lounge and check out a game from our Free Play board game library or take a moment to playtest something brand new. Enjoy a little friendly competition and share feedback directly with the designers!

Check out a gallery of the schedule of featured games here.

Brought to you in partnership with Gamescape, Golden Gate Gamemakers, and Unpub!

Delta Force has been a Steam top 10 mainstay, and Team Jade has learned a lot from this journey. The team behind the game built a global publishing pipeline from scratch to cultivate and support a global fanbase. This microtalk session covers the creation of a marketing roadmap to achieve a high impact-to-cost ratio, conducting PR to create a narrative and maintain exposure, and finding, engaging, and retaining content creators to bring organic traction and content to the game and community.

What makes a first-person shooter game actually feel great? Join Jac Carlsson, 3C and Game Feel designer on Battlefield's latest title as well as lifelong professional dancer/choreographer, for a dynamic exploration of the art and science of "game feel". This session places special emphasis on the responsive, kinetic sensation of "gun feel" at the core of Battlefield 6's first-person combat.

Game feel isn't a feature you print on the back of the box, it's that elusive experience when player intent and the qualitative aspect of the game's response meld seamlessly. Drawing on his background in movement, Jac delves into how the body and perception is surprisingly central to every moment of play, and why input as a physical mechanic sets games apart as a medium.

This lecture reframes game feel theory: why aligning perception and gameplay, technically and audio-visually, is at the heart of the medium, unlocking new creative thinking in design. Jac demystifies practical game feel design in combat mechanics and procedural animation, breaking down how the team crafted a responsive, tactile, and satisfying experience. He also explores how "perceived latency" and the "behavioral quality" in visuals and audio is just as critical as technical performance.

Game feel is a multidisciplinary field. Whether you're an engineer, designer, animator, artist, or sound designer, you'll gain insight into what makes great FPS game feel emerge by design.

Expedition 33's sound was produced by a rather small and young team. We regularly tackled new challenges for the first time, trying to find the best way to handle everything, often thinking we had no idea what we were doing. But we did it anyway, and in the end, we learned that what matters the most isn't to do everything the right way, but to do it with guts. This presentation will go through the pillars of Expedition 33's sound and explain how we did it, from an artistic, technical and production point-of-view, giving attendees an in-depth and honest view on how the sound of Clair Obscur was produced.

People always ask, "How do you power balance thousands of cards in a Trading Card Game?" It seems like an impossibly daunting task. In this session, you will learn how the best in the business do it, and why your game is actually easier to balance the more cards it has. Learn why algorithmic balance, the most common thing people try first, fails. Instead try comparative power sorting; a fairly simple but powerful technique that leverages some cards in your game to help balance others. Moreso, this technique works for any game that has lots of game objects with complex abilities that need balance, but can't achieve it algorithmically.

We've all worked with them: exceptionally skilled individuals whose toxic behavior is excused because of their perceived value. But brilliance isn't worth the cost when it damages team dynamics, erodes trust, and drives away talent. In this talk, Executive Producer Fleur Marty shares a candid, real-world case study and explores the hidden toll of enabling "brilliant jerks" in game development. Attendees learn how to recognize the warning signs, why tolerating toxic talent harms both culture and outcomes, and how to coach (or decisively address) those who refuse to change. Whether leading a small team or a large studio, this session offers practical tools and a compelling call to action: it's time to stop making excuses and start building healthier, higher-performing teams.

GDC’s version of Speed Networking. A fast-track to new contacts, partnerships, and future collaborators. Join us on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday.

"You're sitting with a friend who asks, 'How have you survived 55 years of making games and remained passionate about what we do? What are the top lessons that might help me?'"

I'll share a series of answers, with short explanations for each one. Big issues in the industry. Challenges that affect teams. Topics that come up when you look in the mirror. Use the answers that feel right. Discard the approaches that aren't for you.

The GDC Machine Learning Summit Chairs have designed this Forum session for you. Why? To give you a place to ask any questions you might have about Machine Learning AI in the Video Games Industry. How? By gathering eminent panelists that will be on stage, and having a moderator to bounce questions around. This 60-minute Forum will start with the introduction of our panelists, the moderator will then kick off the session with a few questions while the audience gathers around the mics made available in the room, and then give priority to any questions from the audience. Come to talk about Simulation, Content Creation, Tools, Pipelines, Processes, Operations, Services, Advancement from Academia, and more!

This Forum is all yours—All You Can Ask!

Minecraft's charming, minimalistic art style has always been one of the aspects that defines the brand, but over time we've seen a growing desire from players for evolutions to the graphical capabilities of the game. While third-party mods are available on Minecraft Java to achieve these visual experiences, enhanced graphics were unavailable to most Minecraft players until recently with the release of Vibrant Visuals: a cross platform, 100% real-time, physically based evolution of one of the most successful games of all time.

This session explores the team's journey since 2018, discussing the development of the RenderDragon engine, the evolution of the game's art pipeline to PBR, and the development of Vibrant Visuals. It aims to share our learnings from when we upgraded our graphics engine, how we shipped a high-fidelity experience across such a wide variety of devices, and how we openly developed the upgrade with our players.

This workshop will feature speakers Weszt Hart, Riot Games, and Natasha Miller, Blizzard Entertainment, leading attendees through identifying common risks or roadblocks to prosocial interaction in games, give best practices on mitigating the risks in a way that increases social reward, and provide design/research tools to help increase the likelihood of prosocial interactions occurring in your player community.

The Tools Technology Roundtables' focus on discussion of best practices, novel techniques, and technical trade-offs for building game development tools and services. Game development tools are constantly evolving, so come to share what works (and what doesn't) at your studio, and listen to others discuss how they keep their creative teams producing awesome games.

Day 1: "Engineering", focuses on tools programming, testing, deployment, frameworks, scripting, automation, extensibility, diagnostics, and telemetry.

Day 2: "Assets" focuses on export/import, interchange, persistence, collaboration, search and organization, development models (branching and/or trunking), revision control, and outsourcing.

Day 3: "Build" focuses on processing assets through to the game in all its forms: build systems, caching, distribution, scalability, optimization, disc mastering and patching.

The porting team approach to adapting Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown on Mobile.
The team identified early on the challenges linked to a platformer and combat metroidvania for Mobile. Alexis Denancé presents how the team approached this puzzle and implemented various features & adaptations to enrich the game experience and make it enjoyable to a larger audience while delivering on the true HD experience that brought Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown to win the Innovation in Accessibility Game Award in 2024.
He details at length all the 3Cs adaptation, additional features, as well as the Free Trial format and Playtest learnings during production.

Uplifting Latine Game Devs Here, There, and Everywhere is a solutions-oriented roundtable focused on actionable ways to support Latine developers regardless of where you are. This session will highlight everyday actions, large and small, that can expand opportunities for Latine developers, from amplifying their voices in online spaces, to mentoring, to tangible ways to give visibility to game projects. Attendees will share experiences, explore scenarios, and walk away with meaningful tools and resources to support the growth of Latine game development globally.

On Day 1, Ellie and Jason will facilitate the roundtable covering general topics and revisit topics from the VFX Summit earlier in the week.

The roundtable on Day 2 will focus on VFX through an ARTISTIC LENS. Jason will focus the discussion on your questions concerning the artistic aspects of VFX. This may include art education (as students or veterans), art direction, or whatever else comes up - see you there!

On Day 3, the roundtable will give a TECHNICAL LENS for creating VFX. Ellie will guide the conversation through such as graph based effect authoring, effect lighting and optimization, new mesh based techniques, VR/AR/XR and/or whatever attendees want to go deep on.

Join us for lunch and entertainment in the GDC Gardens.

Stone Stage entertainment presented by MAGWEST:

• 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM: Ultra Combo
• 12:50 - 2:00 PM: 88bit

Review the full week's schedule here.

Monetization, especially in free-to-play titles, is a hugely important aspect of Live Service revenue generation. This session focuses on the monetization ecosystem and content design in 'Delta Force', specifically the foundational logic behind its cross-platform content structure and its innovative attempt to create its gameplay-integrated monetization, which benefits players' retention. At the same time, the 'Delta Force' team have also gained some novel insights through seasonal content cadence optimization. With some concrete examples, we will demonstrate our approach to establishing our IP value, involving players directly into the game and fueling social media virality.

A group of industry veterans with expertise and knowledge on the SAG-AFTRA Interactive contract give practical advice on how to engage with AI under the SAG-AFTRA Interactive Agreement.

Creators in the tabletop industry hold the keys to reducing the carbon footprint of board games. Learn how board games negatively impact the climate crisis and what designers, publishers, and manufacturers can do to reduce their environmental impact. Along with the ways that we can change the culture of sustainability for ourselves and our players. We will discuss both practical and idealist methods to challenge the status quo of tabletop game production and distribution.

Owlcat Games is famous for making sprawling RPGs with tons of player choice and reactivity. Such games often have hundreds or even thousands of individual variables to represent current narrative state: quests, previous decisions, etc. Essentially a bunch of global variables managed with ad-hoc logic.

This approach scales poorly, and so we designed a better system, which organizes game state into a hierarchy of sub-states that are automatically turned on and off while taking into account potential conflicts.

This talk will share the experience of building and using this "Etude"-based system, and show examples of using it in both Unity and Unreal engines.

This session demystifies export formats, engine import settings, and platform-specific texture handling - providing practical guidance for maximizing visual quality while keeping performance and memory in check. Attendees learn how to avoid common pitfalls, like texture bleeding and bloated builds, and explore advanced techniques such as gradient mapping and Signed Distance Fields. Whether targeting high-end PCs or mobile devices, this talk equips artists and technical developers with the insights needed to optimize texture pipelines and ensure stunning visuals don't come at a hidden cost. Real-world examples and actionable workflows make this a must-attend for anyone involved in game art production.

The exponential growth of online gaming generates vast amounts data but also presents unique challenges for recommendation systems—including fluctuating player interests, complex social graphs, and diverse content types. This lecture introduces a novel generative recommendation framework built on large language models and enhanced by reinforcement learning (RL). Designed specifically for gaming ecosystems, it unifies multiple recommendation tasks - such as content, product, social suggestions - into a single architecture, significantly reducing engineering overhead while enabling rapid feature deployment. The RL post-training enables near real-time adaptation to evolving player behavior, optimizing long-term engagement and experience diversity. The solution not only supports dynamic configuration optimization within gameplay but also enhances content delivery across game communities. It demonstrates substantial improvements in retention and engagement compared to current online solutions. Finally, the talk will address scalability, latency, and fairness challenges encountered in real-world deployment.

We hadn't intended to ever run a Kickstarter campaign, but we came to the conclusion that we needed some temporary funding and some additional proof points that we were on the right track.

Niina will take you through the seven biggest lessons she learned executing a Kickstarter campaign in order to:
-Prove market demand for our product
-Create a sense of momentum for our product and company
-Earn some quick operating money without the full process of a formal round of investment funding
-Increase customer awareness for Stars Reach, i.e., the sales funnel.

Wanderstop exists both within and without Cozy Game genre conventions. It contains beautiful landscapes, funny characters and an easy tea making simulation. It does not make the player feel productive or at ease. Lead designer Steve Margolin talks through the design process balancing narrative and mechanics and navigating the tension between expectation and reality. They share anecdotes from development and breakdown the many mechanics that make the player feel uncomfortable. Discomfort is an often maligned design goal, going against general best practice of "finding the fun." In this talk, Steve advocates for the value of discomfort and its place in the designer's toolkit.

Looking at the returning player experience in Diablo Immortal, a mobile game with over three years of content, this talk dives into how the team identifies the biggest pain points our players face, develops a strategy based on those pain points, and designs within that strategy to alleviate the problems. We will also look at how the impact of those decisions is measured, how that helps validate the design, and enables the team to start the cycle over. Through the lens of design, this presentation showcases the importance of utilizing data to craft an experience that will support your returning players' needs.

Before attendees "Ask Video Game Lawyers Anything," this session equips indie and emerging studios with the top legal lessons they wish they had known earlier. Experienced games lawyers, who advise studios from the inside and as external counsel, walk through common pitfalls around contracts, hiring across borders, IP ownership and assignments, record-keeping, marketing claims, taxes, and more. Using real-world examples, they show how small decisions in the early stages of a project can create expensive problems later, or avoid them entirely. The session also demystifies when and how to seek legal advice, how to prepare for those conversations, and what can be handled in-house versus with outside counsel. Spot legal risks early and handle issues proactively, before they become crises.

Making fun and engaging video games is hard, and with thousands of games being released every year, the competition is fierce. Although there is no known recipe for crafting successful games, some clear ingredients do exist, which game developers can use to make their own successful recipe. User experience (UX) and cognitive science disciplines combined provide developers with those ingredients --across all types of games, platforms used, or audiences targeted-- to guide them along the development process. Experiencing a game happens in the player's mind. This is why understanding the human brain (especially its limitations) while it is perceiving and interacting with a game is paramount to accomplishing your developers' goals faster and more efficiently. This workshop covers the main characteristics and limitations of the brain (perception, attention, memory), learning principles and how to apply them in games to onboard players efficiently, usability principles to make your game easy to learn, engageability principles (motivation, emotion, gameflow) to make your game engaging, and will touch on UX strategy, methods, and mindset (including ethical considerations).

This roundtable session allows you to ask any burning legal questions* you may have from a group of industry lawyers. This is a group of video game enthusiasts who happen to be lawyers (or, sure, vice versa). They met at video game and lawyer conventions (yes, video game lawyer conventions are a thing) and have been speaking for years about legal topics near and dear to their favourite digital pastime. The topics to be discussed if nobody's brave: influencer advertising; loot boxes; IP law; corp stuff; the rise of AI; web3 (if we have to); trademarks and other intellectual property; but we'd love to answer YOUR questions and give out legal info on video game and law topics.

* The speakers can't give specific legal advice; and aren't insured for that! Use hypotheticals, people! Of course there's a disclaimer here... we are lawyers, after all.

We all know that breaking into the game industry is difficult, but what do you do once you've already "made it?" This panel explores the space between the intermediate and advanced stages of a freelance career in game audio, filling the gap left behind by the abundance of presentations and resources aimed at beginners. Our panel of established game audio freelancers will discuss pricing strategy, navigating professional relationships as they become increasingly more personal, and the challenges that come with success, among other topics. Attendees will leave with practical advice on how to nurture and grow a career well into maturity, with a focus on balance, stability and emotional intelligence.

The Godot roundtable is all about our favorite open source game engine: Godot!

From game jams to Battlefield 6's official community level editor, Godot is rising in adoption across the industry. This roundtable is a place to discuss common questions regarding adoption, development, studio pipelines, and commercial workflows that come up when considering using Godot for a project. We'll gather questions from the room and discuss them in detail as a group.
Example questions:
- How does one get involved with Godot code contributions?
- How can Godot be used in game development education?
- What are the big drawbacks with Godot adoption for a commercial production today?

Any experience level is welcome!

With the industry in flux, founding studios is harder than ever. From the rapidly changing funding landscape, to studio closures, to new tech and tooling, to new player patterns of Gen A growing up on Roblox and Fortnite it's hard to know how to succeed. Join our rockstar panel of game studio founders who beat the odds to raise a combined total of over $40 Million to date. From navigating investor pitches (and "push back") to building investor trust and overcome knee-jerk reactions to balancing creative vision with business realities, these microtalks and panel offers candid stories and practical strategies for turning bold ideas into thriving studios. We will hear hard-earned lessons from the game studio founders, successes as well as failures. Whether you're an aspiring founder or an established game developer looking to scale, this conversation will arm you with the inspiration and tactics to secure capital and bring your studio to life.

Navigating the workplace or job interviews can be especially challenging for neurodivergent game developers. Differences in communication, stress management, or adapting to change can lead to misunderstandings or feelings of isolation in professional environments. This roundtable explores practical strategies for self-advocacy at work and during interviews. Participants are encouraged to share personal experiences or hypothetical scenarios, learning techniques and insights from one another in a supportive, peer-led discussion. This roundtable is hosted by the IGDA Neurodivergent in Games SIG.

There is a critical facet of game development that needs exploring: the emotional and elusive feel of being a great leader. In order to maintain the health of a project the leader must have their finger firmly on the pulse of the team and be able to diagnose situations that often call for drastically different solutions. In this session, we will investigate facets of soft skills and share specific situations that we have encountered throughout our careers and how soft skills have saved the team and shipped awesome games. Topics include: The three P's of passion: motivating your team, Leadership as a service, Calm urgency, and Decision Deferred: the worst decision of all.

The role of player feedback in game development can be divisive and complex. Some studios totally embrace players' engagement in design through early access, open development, routine user research, and community engagement. Other studios limit player feedback to just post-launch, or perhaps dismiss feedback completely.

How can teams use the 'voice of the player' rationally, effectively and deliberately?

Are there challenges you face that player feedback could overcome?

Can you make a greater success of the feedback and data you already have?

How does the 'voice' of player data change through development?

These three roundtables present a valuable opportunity to surface your challenges, viewpoints and experience on the use of player feedback to inform game design. Learn from the experiences of fellow designers, researchers, data scientists, community and player champions, and take away new perspectives on the value of the players' voice in decision-making.

This roundtable covers pre-production. How can player data inform product direction, greenlight processes, or prototype validation? Bring your questions, experiences and challenges to this roundtable focusing on player data strategy in pre-prod and early-development.

As a game writer or narrative designer, your portfolio is one of the most critical tools for getting hired... So bring yours here! Whether you're an industry hopeful or a veteran writer or narrative designer looking to spruce up your samples, this portfolio workshop will provide individualized feedback on your materials from Senior and Lead-level narrative industry peers. Please bring either a printed copy of your portfolio or have it digitally accessible via your laptop or tablet. As you will be meeting 1:1 with a reviewer, spots are very limited and will be assigned on a first-come first-serve basis.

Please be aware we will not review samples produced by or with AI. Our reviewers are additionally allowed to use their personal discretion for declining samples if found to be in violation of this policy.

How do different disciplines solve the same game-breaking problem — and what happens when bias enters the room? In this candid collaborative session, five Black professionals across narrative, systems, production, and executive roles explore how design decisions get made under pressure. Using real-world examples, panelists reflect on how their roles approach challenges differently and how cultural perspectives shape creative collaboration. This isn't about performing the right answer — it's about surfacing the real thinking behind cross-functional problem-solving. Attendees will gain insight into both technical trade-offs and social dynamics that affect every team. A must-attend for anyone interested in leadership, inclusion, or surviving late-stage development with your design integrity intact.

Telemetry can be a game-changer in helping you develop better tools, but without watching users work, it can also be deeply misleading.

Using real-world examples, this talk offers practical and actionable advice on what telemetry can and cannot tell you, what to consider when adding a telemetry system to your tools, and how to use it to track improvements to the user experience of your tools over time.

Game development teams face tight deadlines that are stymied by production bottlenecks, communication hurdles, and dynamic workflows breaking. Respawn's Apex Legends team adopted a dedicated developer support team model that allows it to overcome these hurdles by reducing the time to resolution of problems and having experts on troubleshooting its systems. Today, the Developer Support team handles upwards of 4000 issues per year with an average response time of less than 2 minutes and an average resolution time of less than 1 hour, ensuring that the Apex Legends development team can get back on track quickly. What's more, we have an escalation rate of less than 10% meaning that 90% of those issues do not require an engineering resource to resolve it, giving valuable focused production time back to the engineering team. With compelling anecdotes and hard data, this talk will focus on the team's formation, use, and impact.

Antisemitism has dramatically increased across the world. Many Jewish game developers have been unable to speak up. If they do, they are met with further antisemitic behavior. This is especially true online where misinformation is shared and corrections are met with resistance - all without consideration for the effect such behavior might have on Jews in the community. This is a community-driven conversation where we’ll share our experiences with antisemitism from our industry and come up with solutions to combat it.

This informal session aims to connect game developers and industry professionals from China with the global game development community at GDC. As the IGDA Shenzhen Chapter, we'll facilitate meaningful conversations about the Chinese game development landscape, share insights on cross-cultural collaboration opportunities, and introduce IGDA's resources and community to developers who may be new to the organization.

Open networking for Chinese developers and international attendees interested in the Chinese market

Brief introduction to IGDA membership benefits and global chapter activities

Casual discussions on current trends in China's gaming industry

Q&A on collaboration opportunities between Chinese and international studios

Information sharing about IGDA Shenzhen Chapter initiatives and how to get involved

This will be conducted in a relaxed, conversational format to encourage genuine connections and community building.

One of our core challenges at Sucker Punch is building an open-world game that goes toe-to-toe with games built by much larger teams with much larger budgets. We've had some success doing this, and a large part of that success comes from harnessing the creative energy of our whole team, rather than expecting a small group of people to make all the creative decisions about the game.
That creates a challenge for us as Creative Directors. Most of the time, we're not telling the team what to do—rather, we're inspiring them with a creative vision, building an enthusiastic consensus, and standing back as the team uses their judgement to reach those creative targets.
The pieces don't always fall into place so cleanly, though—and sometimes we're much more top-down in our creative direction. Join us as we walk through the creative direction process for Ghost of Yōtei.
We'll talk about all the mechanisms we used for communicating vision: presentations, play tests, razors, pillars, trailers, demos, internal AMAs, et al. We'll give specific examples of providing a direction or vision, then watching the team build on that to create an iconic part of the game. We'll also provide specific examples of exerting more control during the game's development for some crucial asset like a game trailer, and other times as a last resort when a vision mismatch popped up. And finally, we'll identify the major inflection points where we course-corrected our vision to match the things we learned during the game's development.

The Game AI Roundtable is organized into three sessions, with each session having its own focus.

Session 1 centers on traditional, non-ML game AI. Topics include behavior trees, utility systems, navigation, tools, and other established techniques. This session avoids machine learning (which is covered on day 3) to keep the conversation targeted towards current mainstream game AI.

Session 2 is a fast-paced Q&A session aimed at all experience levels. Designers, students, programmers, animators, producers, and anyone else curious about game AI are encouraged to bring questions. The goal is to answer as many questions as possible and cover a broad range of topics rather than dive deeply into any single one.

Session 3 focuses on machine learning and generative AI, including LLMs. Discussion will cover current uses, challenges, ethics, and the evolving role of these technologies in games.

There are many game design topics that don't require an hour to discuss, but can be useful, especially for experienced game designers, as quick deep dives or punchy bits of food for thought. The Game Designer’s Notebook asks seasoned game designers to open up a few pages from their notebook, and share insights and explorations into contemporary design issues in the live service game design arena. Part microtalk, part design review, the GDN is the session at the GDC Live Service Summit where game designers get to jump in, go deep and jump out.

Indie Soapbox is the chance for indie devs from diverse backgrounds and projects to come together to share their thoughts, lessons and provocations about indie game dev in this long standing microtalk format. This session features a rich and varied set of themes and topics, all in a punchy format that is sure to provoke, inspire, and broaden your horizons.

Our chosen theme this year is “Playing It Unsafe": diving into the role of indie games in driving innovation and boundary pushing, where devs are exploring themes, conventions, gameplay, representations, etc. that aren't happening elsewhere, and how that breathes vitality into the rest of the industry.

What happens when you've spent decades in games—and the industry suddenly feels like it's moving on without you? In an era of upheaval and layoffs, this roundtable centers game developers aged 50 and above, offering space to reflect, reconnect, and reimagine what's next. We'll explore how to sustain creative drive, manage health and life changes, confront ageism, and navigate retirement or reinvention with confidence. Whether you're looking to stay, pivot, or simply be seen, this session is about honoring experience, finding purpose, and building futures that don't end at 50—but evolve with power, clarity, and intention.

Capturing human history has been a goal for the Civilization franchise since the first iteration. With each successive game in the franchise, the level of care into authentically representing a culture has increased. Our audio team faced challenges finding the most effective ways to accurately represent a culture's music, language, and sounds. These challenges led to new collaborations and design methodologies highlighting the unique sounds around the world and ensuring we capture as many details as possible. Our panel will consist of Dmytro Nebesh, sound designer at Firaxis games, Geoff Knorr, composer on Civilization VII, Finn Taylor, narrative designer and historian at Firaxis games, and Kadet Kuhne, Assoc. Audio Director at Firaxis games. We will discuss the challenges and importance of designing authentic cultural sounds for a game, and the positive results it can have for the overall game design and player immersion.

After a few uncertain years for games journalism, 2025 has brought a fresh wave of opportunity. Independent media organizations are proving there is life and growth beyond corporate structures that struggle to survive in the age of social media. This panel brings together leaders from GamesBeat, Giant Bomb, Aftermath, and Game File to share their journeys and explore what independence means for game studios today.
Panelists will discuss the circumstances that led them to establish independent media brands, challenges they faced during the transition, and offer direct, actionable insights to game makers and their teams that want to break through the noise. They will also highlight how community support has fueled their resilience, how independence shapes editorial direction, and the new creative opportunities now possible. For developers, publishers, and industry professionals, the discussion presents an optimistic and practical outlook on the future of game coverage.

Tim Nixon (thatgamecompany) & Caio Jiacomini (thatgamecompany)

Quiet Room 213

Take a moment from the busy show to relax and enjoy the calming sounds of crystal singing bowls intertwined with the atmosphere of Sky: Children of the Light, before sinking into a short guided meditation to help refresh the mind and body. All are welcome.

Doors Open at 12:30PM.

In Roco Kingdom, there are hundreds of creatures called "Jingling" in various forms and types. How can we bring these Jinglings to life from the perspective of audio?

With an extremely large eco-system that had over 500 species with their own evolutionary chain, the audio team needed to conduct comprehensive sound design for them, including: Jingling voices with 19 complex emotions, Action SFX that matched all emotion movements, Riding SFX of complex motion forms, singing behavior, music designed for signature jinglings and more!

Under the design premise of such quantity and fineness requirements, Morefun studio audio team and POSTRED jointly built feedback pipeline and multi-layered soundscape to support all the creature audio design work. This ultimately boosted the efficiency and let the teams find the balance between width and depth.

At the heart of the PlayStation™ ecosystem, a mission-critical service is responsible for a single, vital function: confirming every player's access to their games and digital content. For a platform with over 350 million user accounts, this entitlement system must be flawless, instant, and always available. As PlayStation's user base and content library grew, the decade-old legacy data architecture was pushed to its breaking point. Faced with spiraling costs and performance bottlenecks that directly impacted their most loyal players, Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) needed more than just a new database—they needed a new paradigm. This is the story of how SIE migrated its planet-scale entitlement system to Google Cloud Spanner, a database uniquely designed for this class of problem, achieving a 10x reduction in storage and a 50% drop in costs, all with zero downtime.

How do you build a thriving game community, then step back and let it run itself?

In this session, Emma Smith-Bodie, Community Manager at Playstack, shares how indie hit Balatro cultivated a self-sustaining player community on Discord and Reddit. From creating the right foundations to knowing when to let go, she'll walk through practical tactics for attracting early players, maintaining long-term engagement, and handing over the reins to your fans.

Learn how to foster loyalty, spark genuine conversation, and recognize when your players are ready to lead. You will leave with actionable strategies and a new perspective on community building, one where stepping back is the ultimate sign of success.

The games industry holds a unique and powerful position in shaping the future of our planet’s climate. Its cultural reach, educational potential through game design, and direct influence on carbon emissions make it one of the most impactful industries of our time. Yet, many professionals within it often feel lost, overwhelmed, or powerless within a system that seems to move forward regardless of environmental consequences.

In this session, climate psychologist, sustainability educator, and former co-chair of the IGDA Climate SIG, Dr. Clayton Whittle, creates space to explore climate challenges within the games industry and the pressures faced by its professionals as they consider their role in building a more sustainable future for games.

Participants will find a supportive environment to discuss these issues, engage with a practical toolkit for sustainable advocacy, and discover actionable strategies for climate-conscious design.

Grounded in the understanding that meaningful climate action requires community, this session emphasizes how collective support empowers real, lasting change across the games industry.

Day 1: Process
Automated testing provides a team with stability across development, allowing early feedback, fast iteration and empowering QA. Yet investing in automation has a bad reputation in the industry, where just-ship-it is the mantra. Maybe, as the market becomes increasingly competitive, its time has finally come.

Day 1 consists of a discussion about the people that write the tests and the workflows used to reinforce them. How does the process work in your studio? Are the engineers responsible for automated tests, or QA? Are QA silo'd or integrated? What could be better? What doesn't work?

These roundtables bring people together from all experience levels and budgets to discuss how they currently, or would like to, use automated testing of any form. See atig.dev/gdc for more details and to join our discord!

Day 1: "Audio Programming Roundtable: Game Integration"
This roundtable session will focus on tools and techniques for integrating with game engines. Topics will center around technology choices, game audio engine design, and tool design. Newbies and experts are welcome to come and share their wisdom.

Day 2: "Audio Programming Roundtable: Low-Level Topics"
This roundtable session will focus on low-level topics such as DSPs and mixing. Topics will center around algorithms, interesting effects to implement, and integrating those effects into workflows. Newbies and experts are welcome to come and share their wisdom.

Day 3: "Audio Programming Roundtable: Free-for-all"
In this roundtable session we will cover any topics that we didn't get to in the previous two days. We will also have a Q&A session where your questions can be answered by expert audio programmers. Newbies and experts are welcome to come and share their wisdom.

Wrap up your Independent Games Summit experience at "Indie Unwind", a relaxed, informal session-into-gathering led by the Independent Games Summit Chairs, designed exclusively for indie game developers. Following the thought-provoking Indie Soapbox session, this is your chance to slow down, unwind, and prepare yourself for the rest of GDC week.

Connect with fellow indie devs, exchange ideas, share your experiences, or simply decompress in a welcoming and supportive environment. Let's celebrate our community, create new friendships, and recharge before heading back into the world of indie game creation.

There are countless ways to produce a game. The Game Production Roundtable aims to move the industry forward by creating space for producers of all levels to come together to share their experiences, discuss challenges they’re facing, and build relationships with their peers.

Each day, we’ll cover topics across the spectrum of production, loosely following the themes of Process, People, and Career. Potential topics include: Supporting team motivation and fulfillment through production, identifying when a process isn’t working, using scope and schedule as tools to make a better product, navigating changes to scope, cultivating team buy-in and ownership of processes, crunch, empowering the team, scheduling, advice for first-time producers, and how to continue developing your production skills.

Another component of the roundtable will focus on supporting the next generation of producers by allowing newcomers to ask questions that help prepare them for their production careers.

This is a roundtable discussion about careers in system design. We will discuss the role of system design in different developmental stages and how it interacts with other design and development disciplines in a team structure. The opportunities and challenges of different career stages for system designers. How to navigate system design with the industry’s fast-changing nature of genre/platform/audience preference.

We hope this will be a concentrated space for system designers from different stages of their career and development experience to discuss the love (and hate) of working in the discipline and how to navigate current job markets and funding climate as a system designer.

For the third year running, Newzoo presents the definitive PC & console market update — built on exclusive global datasets and player research. Join Ben Porter, Director of Consulting, for a data-driven look at the latest market sizing, platform shifts, regional highlights, and key opportunities for developers, publishers, and platform holders. This 60-minute session will also explore 1–2 special topics based on fresh 2026 data, ensuring maximum relevance. Attendees will leave with actionable insights to inform business strategy, monetization planning, and player engagement in the year ahead.

In this long-running session (which ironically always finishes on time), we will shed light on the most important developments in the live service gaming market on mobile and PC/console through the lens of deep dives on some of the most important games and trends of the past year. Each segment of the talk will shed light on challenges and opportunities in the market and provide useful lessons to designers, product leaders, and strategists. The combination of information packed mini-lectures with unfortunately ample dad jokes will leave you groaning, but better informed about the state of live service games and their most important recent developments.

Opening Night at the Ballpark is your all-in kickoff. This is the moment for the B2B games community to come together for tabletop battles, surprise activations, classic ballpark bites, and when the sun sets, trailers and your fan-voted movie will light up the big screen.

Please find more information and a walking map to Oracle Park here: https://gdconf.com/opening-night-at-the-ballpark

Backpacks (including clear backpacks) are NOT permitted inside Oracle Park. Accommodations are made for diaper bags, medical bags and guests with accessible needs. Otherwise this policy is strictly enforced and exceptions will not be made. Other bags, that do not exceed 16" x 16" x 8" in size, are permitted: paper and plastic grocery bags, purses, fanny packs, lunch bags, briefcases, diaper bags, soft-sided coolers, and handbags. Hard-sided coolers are not permitted. Bags do not need to be clear.

Tim Nixon (thatgamecompany) & Caio Jiacomini (thatgamecompany)

Quiet Room 213

Take a moment from the busy show to relax and enjoy the calming sounds of crystal singing bowls intertwined with the atmosphere of Sky: Children of the Light, before sinking into a short guided meditation to help refresh the mind and body. All are welcome.

Doors Open at 9:00 AM.

Grab a board game and let the games begin! Stop by the lounge and check out a game from our Free Play board game library or take a moment to playtest something brand new. Enjoy a little friendly competition and share feedback directly with the designers!

Check out a gallery of the schedule of featured games here.

Brought to you in partnership with Gamescape, Golden Gate Gamemakers, and Unpub!

Part 1 – Patrick Mendenall (Arm)

Our global research confirms that while AI adoption accelerates development, deployment is often blocked by hardware and software fragmentation and unpredictable performance. The core challenge isn't your vision; it is the cost of navigating platform-specific complexity. You need a stable foundation to focus on the experience, not the device. To support this, we are evolving the Arm ecosystem into an accessible toolbox. We are designing solutions like KleidiAI to help you ship games without low-level optimization burdens. We are advancing Frame Advisor and our RenderDoc extensions to unify graphics and ML debugging. Furthermore, we are enabling Neural Graphics pipelines to unlock visual fidelity beyond traditional rendering limits, focusing on engine enablement to ensure readiness.

Part 2 – Lukas Medek (Sumo Digital)

What happens when advanced neural technology frees up performance budget on mobile? You make room for real innovation. In this session, Sumo Digital showcases a new case study demonstrating how Arm's neural technology enables the team to push the boundaries of real-time lighting and visual fidelity on mobile devices. By offloading selected workloads to neural acceleration, Sumo's developers can reallocate precious performance headroom to explore cutting-edge Unreal Engine features, including Megalights, ray tracing, and Actor Sequences, all while maintaining smooth, playable performance on mobile hardware.

Building for hands requires a different mindset than controllers. In this session, Meta shares how to evaluate whether hands fit your project, design patterns that translate player intent into action, and pitfalls that trip up first-time implementers. Double Jack built hands into their game, Maestro, from day one and shares what worked, what didn't, and what surprised them.

Live Service games succeed by evolving continuously, but only when that evolution stays anchored in what players love. This session brings together leaders behind long-running global live-service titles, Candy Crush Saga and Minecraft, to share how they keep games thriving year after year. The teams from King and Mojang will explore how they balance innovation with stability, modernize legacy systems, and adapt to shifting player expectations - all while maintaining trust and delivering consistent fun player experiences at scale. From multi-year updates to everyday live operations, this session offers a clear look at what it really takes to run, evolve, and future-proof two of the world’s most enduring games. Through behind-the-scenes case studies and honest lessons learned, Eva Ryott, Ryan Cooper, and Romain Jemma will share how their teams make long-term decisions, structure collaboration across disciplines, and navigate complex technical and creative trade-offs to keep their games evolving with clarity and purpose.

Join Chris Melissinos, recipient of the 2013 Game Developers Choice Award "Ambassador Award" and Principal Evangelist for Video Games and Immersive Technologies at AWS, as he explores the most significant transformation in the video game industry in over 50 years. Drawing from a lifetime of playing, collecting, and working within the gaming world, Melissinos will trace the original vision that sparked the industry, examine how video games have evolved into a defining art form, and analyze the forces currently reshaping the landscape. He will also share predictions for where the industry is headed. This keynote offers both historical perspective and forward-looking insights into what video games are today and what they can become tomorrow.

Evolve beyond Live Services into "Living Games" that rapidly react to player behavior. Google demonstrates how Generative AI closes the loop between player behavior and content creation. Attendees will gain practical strategies for scalable implementation, solving IP challenges, and managing costs to build the next generation of endlessly replayable, responsive experiences.

Game developers invest deeply in their creative work, but without a clear understanding of intellectual property (IP), that work is vulnerable to theft, misuse, or expensive legal disputes.

This session provides essential guidance to avoid mistakes that can derail the creative process or threaten the survival of an emerging studio. IP attorney and former software engineer, Benjamin Siders, guides attendees through the process of protecting their creative work, spotting legal risks and knowing when to call in professional legal help. He will cover common, and costly, mistakes developers make with collaborators, contracts and AI-generated content.

Using real-world examples and hypotheticals, Benjamin details what developers can manage on their own and where hidden traps often lie. Attendees will walk away with legal literacy, practical DIY strategies to reduce risk, and the confidence that their creations are protected, and that they are not unintentionally infringing on others' property.

This session explores how "Love and Deepspace" achieved instant emotional connection and commercial success by translating the science of attraction into character design. Through intuitive visual cues, distinctive personalities, and layered backstories, Infold Games' creative pipeline builds characters that captivate players at first sight and foster meaningful, lasting engagement. Attendees will learn practical strategies ranging from applying psychological insights to encouraging player expression, offering a framework for creating memorable, emotionally resonant characters in expansive 3D worlds.

The G.A.N.G. Sound Design Demo Derby is a longstanding tradition at GDC, and has been a cornerstone event for new and emerging audio professionals. Attendees can submit 120 seconds of their best work for a detailed critique and feedback from a team of leading audio directors and professionals. They can also participate in an active discussion with fellow panelists and audience members. The Derby is open to GDC attendees across all disciplines.

Attendees can submit their demos using the following link: https://www.audiogang.org/demo-derby-submission/

GDC’s version of Speed Networking. A fast-track to new contacts, partnerships, and future collaborators. Join us on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday.

Game development has been transformed in the last 5 to 10 years, especially for indie teams. Even AAA studios are struggling to adapt. Indies are agile enough to adapt their operational strategies to use the latest tools to increase the efficiency and quality of their game development pipeline. This session, hosted by the IGDA Indie SIG, will discuss the best tools and strategies for indie game developers to succeed in this new environment. Attendees will be encouraged to provide input on the strategies they plan to use and we will all learn together.

Drawing on AppMagic's daily panel of hundreds top-grossing mobile games, this session uncovers ten LiveOps patterns — five offer mechanics and five event frameworks — that reliably lift revenue x1.5–2. It starts with a crisp market snapshot showing why few new releases become successful.

Children are not just mini versions of adult gamers. Kids' gaming preferences and abilities are affected by their developing cognitive and physical abilities. We will focus on the design of games for kids, including considering children's development at different ages and the implications for game mechanics, as well as on marketing, discovery, and business models. When the target audience is children - it is always tricky. But it's not impossible!

Join The MADE for a Community Space meetup with the game history and preservation community. Network and meet with current members of the community and preservation experts.

This year’s Production Workshop examines every stage of the game development lifecycle, from Conception to Launch, highlighting the critical hard and soft skills required to successfully navigate them.

This session is a deep dive into solving complex, real-world problems. Far from a "Production 101" course, this is a fully interactive day featuring roundtable exercises and collaborative discussions. Beyond the planned curriculum, participants are encouraged to workshop their own past and current challenges with the help of facilitators and peers.

The afternoon also features a panel of experienced producers representing a wide range of expertise, from Casual and Mobile games to AAA, Co-Dev partnerships, and Publishing. Following the panel, the day concludes with a “Quick Fire” mentoring session where attendees will have the opportunity to sit down with the speakers for direct insights and advice.

While we encourage attendees to join us for the full day, you may choose to attend only the morning or afternoon sessions.

Hosts: Brynley Gibson (Sharkmob), Dave Ranyard (Dream Reality Interactive), and Fleur Marty (Gearbox).

Morning Session Schedule

· 10:30am – 10:45am: Welcome and Introduction

· 10:45am – 12:20pm: Workshop Part 1: Conception to Alpha An interactive workshop identifying common development challenges during conception, pre-production, and early production, and the critical skills producers need to navigate them.

· 12:20pm – 1:50pm: Lunch Break

Afternoon Session Schedule

· 1:50pm – 3:30pm: Workshop Part 2: Alpha to Launch An interactive workshop focusing on the challenges faced during post-production and closing, emphasizing the specific producer toolkits required to cross the finish line.

· 3:30pm – 3:45pm: Coffee Break

· 3:45pm – 4:30pm: Panel: The Many Roles of the Producer (Moderated by Fleur Marty; Panelists: Daphné Moyal (Virtuos), Ella Vance (The New York Times), Shayna Moon (CD Projekt RED), Shelby Martin (2K) and Zachary Beaudoin (T-Minus Zero Entertainment). Experts from across the industry, covering everything from Indie to AAA, share their perspectives on the versatile and evolving nature of the Producer role.

· 4:30pm – 5:30pm: Quick Fire Mentoring (Brynley Gibson, Dave Ranyard, Fleur Marty, and panelists) Experienced producers offer one-on-one guidance and rapid feedback on your specific production challenges.

The tabletop games industry is fragmented, confusing, and full of some the most exciting ideas in all of game design. In this talk Bryan Bornmueller will share advice from my multiple decades of experience and current insights gained both in my current role as Director of Sourcing at Asmodee (one of the largest players in the tabletop games space) and designer of the Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game (winner of the Golden Geek for best co-op game 2024) for current and aspiring board, card, and tabletop game designers. He will discuss the shape of the tabletop landscape, what publishers are looking for, practical advice and resources for pitching, prototyping, and promotion of modern tabletop games.

Are you eager to record live with an orchestra or chamber ensemble? This lecture breaks down the entire process—from budgeting and session planning to team roles, recording strategy, and post-production. Drawing on hundreds of hours in studios around the world, Mike will share real budgets, scheduling templates, and behind-the-scenes stories from sessions in London, Vienna, and beyond. Learn how to save thousands through smart planning, avoid costly pitfalls, and get the most out of your musicians and recording time. Whether you're a composer, audio director, or music producer, you'll walk away with practical tools to approach your first (or next) live session with confidence.

One of Kingdom Come: Deliverance's most prominent features is the deeply simulated open world. All the NPCs are doing their daily routines and reacting to player actions even when the player is long gone. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 not only quadruples the number of NPCs on the map to nearly 2400 but also concentrates around half of that into a single city. To keep the frame times and memory reasonably low, new techniques for the level of detail of the AI simulation had to be introduced, while making the scripting interface as oblivious to the LODs as possible. This talk describes the evolution of AI LOD solutions and optimizations through KCD and KCD2 from a technical point of view.

The role of a technical artist has grown from a clean-up artist and data wrangler to someone who is in charge of complex content creation pipelines and asset tracking systems. Increasingly, the lines between programmer and artist are blurring for technical artists. Tool creation, scripting, shader creation, working with both programmers and artists, and managing workflow are all skills required of a modern technical artist. This roundtable brings together technical artists from across the industry to share their knowledge, experiences, and tips for being the best at their jobs.

This full-day interactive workshop returns for the fourth time, streamlined and improved to teach teams and individuals how to integrate climate change and climate resilience messaging into their games. Through expert lectures and hands-on design activities, participants will both better understand the climate crisis and unlock their own superpowers as game developers, immediately applying new theory and practice to develop an original game pitch by the end of the day. Join us and become equipped to impact gamers and ultimately change the world with actionable design approaches.

Join us for lunch and entertainment in the GDC Gardens.

Stone Stage entertainment presented by MAGWEST:

• 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM: Lacey Johnson
• 12:50 PM - 2:00 PM: Sixth Station Trio

Review the full week's schedule here.

Discover the future of gaming and technology in this exclusive session with John Spitzer, Vice President at Nvidia. John will share the latest innovations in RTX hardware, neural rendering, and path tracing. See how Generative AI is transforming development workflows and unlocking player experiences once thought impossible.

Games have always been experience machines — but for over a decade, we've been optimizing the same paradigm. Better specs, same loop between you and the screen. The next leap isn't coming from hardware. It's coming from a fundamental shift in who inhabits our worlds. Millions of autonomous AI agents are entering game worlds — not as NPCs, but as independent actors that scheme, create, and develop followings of their own. When NEXUS built the first games for them, agents formed alliances, betrayed each other, and broke our servers within hours. What emerged wasn't an incremental improvement to game design. It was a different medium. This session is a builder's account of that moment — and a vision for what comes next: that the people who design entire worlds — their rules, their economies, their stories — are about to become the most important creators alive.

Fortnite is more than a game—it’s an ecosystem where players come with different devices, inputs, and play styles, but share the same expectations for fun and quality.

In this session. we’ll explore what it means to design cross-platform games using Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN). We’ll look at how cross-platform development has traditionally fragmented design and workflows, and how UEFN reframes cross-platform not as a checkbox, but as a design philosophy baked into creation and publishing. Using examples shown across PC, console, and mobile, we’ll examine what stays consistent, what adapts, and why.

Dive deeper into UEFN tools—like profiling, world partitioning, modular design, and systemic gameplay—that support strong design judgment, faster iteration, and sustainable development.

Part 1 – John French (Arm)

In this session, we explore three lesser-known mobile performance problems that might be affecting a Unity game, what can cause them, and how to avoid them. We use our in-house game to demonstrate what can go wrong, how to find where the problems are, and how to fix them. Learn how to ensure that your game runs efficiently on mobile devices and how hardware-level profiling tools such as Arm Performance Studio can reveal hidden performance issues with mobile 3D graphics. This talk gives mobile game developers insight into device-specific profiling tools and optimization techniques, helping you reach a wider audience with your games.

Part 2 – Dominic de Graaf (The Naked Dev)

High-fidelity visuals aren't just for desktop games. With the right upscaling techniques, mobile GPUs can deliver stunning graphics that feel next-gen, without tanking frame rates. In this session, Dominic de Graaf (The Naked Dev), creator of popular Unity upscaling solutions (DLSS 4 for Unity and FSR 3 for Unity) shares his experience integrating multiple upscalers, including Arm Accuracy Super Resolution (Arm ASR).

Marvel Rivals achieved 10 million players signing up within 72 hours of its December 2024 launch. Within three months, the game had over 40 million users, peaking at 644,000 concurrent players on Steam.
The Publishing and Marketing Director of Marvel Rivals unveils the operational strategies behind this success, establishing Marvel Rivals as a premier live-service hero shooter.
Attendees gain actionable frameworks for building player-centric communities through real-time sentiment tracking and co-creation tools; executing effective publishing aligned with the IP lore; optimizing content cadence and transforming monetization through transparent systems; and enabling live-ops agility via cross-functional team synchronization.
These methodologies provide a replicable blueprint for launching and sustaining hit live-service games.

What if building a shader felt more like painting a portrait than solving a math equation? In this session, Naughty Dog Technical Artist and illustrator Rosy Fu reveals how classical oil painting techniques can guide the development of artistic character shaders. Drawing on metaphors from Caravaggio's process—canvas stretching, grisaille, glazing, and varnish—matching real-time shading, from UV setup and depth masking to lighting models, color packing, and final polish. This talk reframes shader authoring as an artistic process, helping attendees visualize complex systems with greater clarity and creativity.

This session gives game developers a practical framework for diagnosing the problems most likely to sink a studio, before an investor, publisher, or the market finds them first.

Drawing on 22 years of experience as a fractional COO, angel investor, and advisor to indie game studios, the speaker walks through seven categories of studio health that experienced investors and publishers use to evaluate teams, often without founders realizing it. The talk uses a simple information-quality lens, Signal, Proxy, and Placeholder, to help attendees assess whether their answers to hard questions are actually holding up, or just filling space.

Tailored for teams of 1 to 100, the session covers founder fit and role clarity, product and market alignment, production and operational readiness, go-to-market traction, business model realism, narrative consistency, and legal and platform risk. Each category includes a concrete red flag and a before-and-after example showing the difference between a weak answer and a strong one.

This is not a theory talk. It is a practical guide to what goes wrong, why it was usually visible in advance, and what you can do about it now.

In this session, attendees will learn how free-to-play mid-core title "Heroes of History" doubled per-player monetization performance compared to its predecessor, "Rise of Cultures". Based on this case study, Lukas will share tools and best practices for grounding games in solid business hypotheses, designing game systems that facilitate effective monetization and avoid cannibalization, and designing monetization initiatives that capture value effectively. Lukas argues that monetization is not a ploy to extract more money from players, but a win-win situation for both players and game developers: Failing to monetize effectively, UA-driven free-to-play games reach a smaller audience, receive fewer content updates, and ultimately die.

An opportunity for deeper conversations with audio track speakers over lunch in a smaller scale setting. Grab some food and then come back to sit at tables in the round with the day's speakers on the topics that are top of mind for you about the industry, the day's topics, and the questions at the top of attendee minds.

Community is no longer a support function; it fuels growth.

As user acquisition costs rise, platform policies tighten, and player attention fragments, durable growth increasingly depends on the strength of your community. Studios that treat community as a marketing afterthought are leaving engagement, retention, and monetization on the table.

In this session, Chip and Cisco will explore how community strategy directly shapes product outcomes, business resilience, and long-term franchise value. Drawing from experience across publishing, live service, and cross- platform ecosystems, they will break down:
● The critical foundations of community design from day zero
● How community strategy impacts acquisition, retention, and lifetime value
● Why players disengage, and how to mitigate churn at the community layer
● Practical frameworks for scaling community from pre-launch through maturity
● The direct and indirect revenue impact of community-driven ecosystems
● Untapped opportunities studios are overlooking in 2026

This session moves beyond platitudes to provide strategic, actionable guidance for teams building games designed to not just survive but to thrive.

Part 1 – Sergio Alapont (Arm)

In this talk, we present the rendering pipeline behind Sumo Digital's new mobile case study featuring fully ray-traced lighting. We explain how we are pushing real-time performance on mobile hardware by combining aggressive pipeline engineering with Arm's neural rendering technologies, including neural super-resolution, neural denoising, and neural frame-rate upscaling.

Part 2 – Willen Yang (Arm)

Game development is entering a new era where AI-driven rendering and neural techniques redefine performance and visual fidelity. Arm's Neural Graphics SDK (NG SDK) brings advanced neural-based rendering, denoising, and super-resolution capabilities to game engines, enabling developers to achieve desktop-quality graphics on mobile and edge devices without sacrificing frame rates.

Bubble or not, machine learning is here, and it works. Advanced techniques in Machine Learning have already been widely applied in the video game industry, powering products that are available on the market today, such as Nvidia DLSS and Bandai Namco Tekken8 "Super Ghost Battle" system. From content creation to runtime optimization and the underlying fabric of live service features, Machine Learning is increasingly becoming the solution to the problems many developers face. In fact, it has the potential to the whole video games industry by storm in the coming years, in many disruptive ways.

For leaders and investors, it's essential to understand where we are, and where this technology is going. Esteemed industry leader Julien Merceron will share not only his own insights and opinions on the trends and futures of Machine Learning, but the voices of many other industry experts.

This session is designed to prioritize YOUR questions, offering a unique opportunity to explore trends, challenges, and opportunities in an open forum. Join us for an hour of discussion, this session is all yours! Ask anything!

UI sound design is not only necessary, it is an opportunity to bring your game to the next level. But how to ensure it is communicating clearly and intuitively, staying on brand, works well in repetition, and is also fun? In this presentation, Assoc. Audio Director Kadet Kuhne offers a deep dive into the strategies and processes behind designing UI sounds at scale for Civilization VII. The talk explores how a UI sound design system was built efficiently and effectively, incorporating hierarchies and key design principles to support Civilization VII's new visual style. With that foundation in place, building out polished UI with bespoke, engaging sounds will be fully detailed with real-world examples of challenges, solutions, and impactful results. Additionally, the presentation covers implementation within dynamic and complex game systems to ensure UI audio remains communicative, fun, and fully optimized throughout gameplay.

At GDC 2011, Stone spoke about 15 tabletop games he created for his family and close friends. 15 years later, he has continued this tradition of designing a new game every year: a play-by-mail game for his sons in college, a real-time rhythm card game for drum students, a social game for a wedding, and—most recently—several highly personalized tabletop games for his four grandchildren.
In this session, Stone details those 15 games and describes how his design philosophy evolved during that time. Each game teaches its own special lesson, with unique constraints shaped by the experiences of his small audience. Many of the tips and techniques can be applied to games that you create for the people closest in your life.

Many devs love to skip all the behind-the-scenes marketing prep work that no one publicly sees. Traditional marketing best practices can seem obtuse or even useless when you do not understand the benefit they provide to marketing a game. In this talk, we will demonstrate why it's crucial to not skip this behind-the-scenes work and how things like SWOT analysis, market research, audience research, and more translate into actual marketing assets, more effective trailers, and impactful strategies. We will provide real-life examples of marketing assets and decisions created as a result of these foundational marketing pillars leaving devs with an understanding of why they matter, how to conduct them, and the benefits for their game.

Many studios, new and old, are using a version of work-for-hire as a way to keep their teams afloat while developing original IP. While common, this model brings a unique set of challenges - like managing team bandwidth across projects, maintaining internal momentum, and navigating unpredictable client timelines alongside your own projects. In this roundtable, studio leaders currently balancing client work with their own original game development come together to share strategies, pitfalls, and what has worked for them. Moderated by the CEO of Petricore, Ryan Canuel, who has led a hybrid studio for over a decade - the session encourages open discussion around operations, staffing, sales, and sustainability. Attendees will leave with real-world insights and tactics they can bring back to their own teams to better manage the work-for-hire model while still moving original projects forward.

Community doesn’t end at the controller. Hosted by AAPI In Gaming, this roundtable is a space to explore how we create and nurture belonging beyond the bounds of the gaming industry. From food and mental health to creative expression and representation, we’ll discuss how our diverse voices are shaping a more connected world. Join us as we allow attendees to share personal stories, community-building strategies, and visions for an inclusive future where AAPI identity and creativity can thrive in every space we play, create, and exist.

The current state of the industry has been fraught with the loss of knowledge, expertise, and loss of momentum. How do we pick up the pieces to cultivate UX maturity and innovation? How do we maintain creativity and design enthusiasm when our professional future has been uncertain for years. Does the answer lie in community and grassroots knowledge sharing?

Join this networking session to create meaningful connections through open and vulnerable conversations around our hopes for the future of UX maturity. As well, sharing our resilience strategies that have been guiding you through these tumultuous times

In a time of political uncertainty, industry layoffs, and risk-averse decision-making, open conversations about diversity and inclusion are more urgent than ever. This multi-day roundtable invites participants to explore bold topics like surviving and resisting political tension, self-advocacy, and allyship. Through deep, focused dialogue led by a variety of voices, we will examine how to support marginalized communities and drive change wherever you are in the industry. Join us to move beyond performative talk and toward actionable steps for a more inclusive future.

Day 1: Fighting Back: How to take care of yourself as a marginalized person & offer your support as a person of privilege

Day 2: Making it Happen and Advocating for Yourself: How to use your privilege to make change & where/how to find support as a marginalized person

The IGDA considers mentorship to be one of the critical cornerstones on which we must build a strong and diverse industry. As such, the IGDA Mentor Café program provides a way for developers to support each other and connect in person through mentorship. This event is open to GDC attendees, but individuals must register in advance as a Mentor or Mentee. Space is limited.

Register here!

Teaching Game Development in High Schools, Middle Schools, and Youth Activity camp settings presents unique challenges that are distinct from how post-secondary education approaches Game Development, while also differing from how other secondary educators approach the instruction of other disciplines. These issues are compounded by a lack of communication between educators, often resulting in educators having to teach in isolation, with limited meaningful support available at the site, district, county, or even state level.

This roundtable aims to identify common challenges associated with proposing, creating, and teaching Game Development in a Youth Educational setting. Allowing educators to come together to form a community of practice and start to identify possible best practices to improve student outcomes and improve program resilience.

One of the biggest challenges in development is knowing when your game's script is ready for that final recording and implementation in the game. A scene can look great on the page but fall flat once you hear it from your actor's mouths – what then? Too often script issues are surfaced late in the process, when fixes would be rushed, prohibitively expensive, or creatively compromised. This session proposes a practical, hands-on solution: teaching teams how to "beta test" their scripts collaboratively, utilizing the entire pipeline of writers, actors, directors and developers. Complete with a live script-reading demonstration by renowned game actors, this original session demystifies the performance pipeline, strengthens cross-disciplinary trust, and equips developers with a practical method to ensure that what looks good on paper also sounds great out loud.

This year’s Production Workshop examines every stage of the game development lifecycle, from Conception to Launch, highlighting the critical hard and soft skills required to successfully navigate them.

This session is a deep dive into solving complex, real-world problems. Far from a "Production 101" course, this is a fully interactive day featuring roundtable exercises and collaborative discussions. Beyond the planned curriculum, participants are encouraged to workshop their own past and current challenges with the help of facilitators and peers.

The afternoon also features a panel of experienced producers representing a wide range of expertise, from Casual and Mobile games to AAA, Co-Dev partnerships, and Publishing. Following the panel, the day concludes with a “Quick Fire” mentoring session where attendees will have the opportunity to sit down with the speakers for direct insights and advice.

While we encourage attendees to join us for the full day, you may choose to attend only the morning or afternoon sessions.

Hosts: Brynley Gibson (Independent), Dave Ranyard (Dream Reality Interactive), and Fleur Marty (Gearbox).

Morning Session Schedule

· 10:30am – 10:45am: Welcome and Introduction

· 10:45am – 12:20pm: Workshop Part 1: Conception to Alpha An interactive workshop identifying common development challenges during conception, pre-production, and early production, and the critical skills producers need to navigate them.

· 12:20pm – 1:50pm: Lunch Break

Afternoon Session Schedule

· 1:50pm – 3:30pm: Workshop Part 2: Alpha to Launch An interactive workshop focusing on the challenges faced during post-production and closing, emphasizing the specific producer toolkits required to cross the finish line.

· 3:30pm – 3:45pm: Coffee Break

· 3:45pm – 4:30pm: Panel: The Many Roles of the Producer (Moderated by Fleur Marty; Panelists: Daphné Moyal (Virtuos), Ella Vance (The New York Times), Krystal Cooper (Rochester Institute of Technology), Shelby Martin (2K) and Zachary Beaudoin (T-Minus Zero Entertainment)) Experts from across the industry, covering everything from Indie to AAA, share their perspectives on the versatile and evolving nature of the Producer role.

· 4:30pm – 5:30pm: Quick Fire Mentoring (Brynley Gibson, Dave Ranyard, Fleur Marty, and panelists) Experienced producers offer one-on-one guidance and rapid feedback on your specific production challenges.

The features and ease of use of game engines have grown alongside improvements in graphics hardware capabilities. Previously challenging and advanced techniques reserved only for graphics programmers to submit as white papers, the technology is now available to clever technical artists who are willing to put in a bit of elbow grease.

Feel free bring a laptop to "sketch" along in your own projects!

Epic Games' Matt Oztalay will show you just how easy it is to harness the power of compute shaders to build ever more advanced, and gameplay-relevant, graphics features for your next project.

Leading the technology of a project can be a daunting task and it can often feel like a trek into uncharted territory. This roundtable invites hard-won lessons, candid insights, and practical advice between engineering leaders who share the challenge of managing the big picture of technology across games and teams.

In this session, attendees will propose and vote on discussion topics. Expected themes include: architectural design, long-term planning, collaboration between departments, balancing performance and stability with the delivery of the team, and more. We'll move through selected topics in open conversation, guided by experienced moderators.
Bring your problems and questions. Be ready to share solutions and insight. If you've wondered how to tackle the big picture of tech — you're not alone.

In the roundtable for Understanding AI in Game Audio, the AI Working Group co-chairs will present findings and best practices for AI not only in the generative space but also in tooling. We will present the WIKI for roundtable members and encourage frank but respectful discussion in this space and answer any questions regarding AI in Game Audio, with a code of conduct and ethics briefly outlined at the start of the talk. This talk is hosted by the IGDA IA-SIG.

The games industry thrives when people across disciplines, career stages, and perspectives connect directly. This open networking session brings together developers, studio leaders, Trust & Safety professionals, students, job seekers, investors, and operators in one shared space to build relationships that move the industry forward.

Playing new games is fun, but helping create them is even better! Play the tabletop games of the future today in our playtesting area hosted by Unpub. There's no registration required for players — seats are first-come first-served.

If you are a designer looking to have your game playtested, you must have reserved a table in advance. Reservations are now closed. More info: https://www.unpub.org/gdc

Games have become the modern world's social commons, where friendships form, conflicts
play out, and culture is created in real time. This panel brings together community designers,
trust & safety leads, and game directors to explore practical strategies for how studios can
nurture positive community behavior and transform toxicity into teachable moments.

Panelists will share:
 Moderation frameworks that scale from indie to AAA
 Design interventions that reward pro-social behavior without feeling heavy-handed
 Player education systems that shift mindsets rather than simply punishing actions
 Case studies from studios that transformed repeat offenders into positive community
leaders through targeted intervention

Through data-driven insights and lived experience, the panel will demonstrate how empathy-
driven design, transparent communication, and systemic thinking can build resilient
communities that self-regulate and thrive.

Join Bill Kleyman (Co-founder and CEO of Apolo.us) and Robert Shearer (Corporate Vice President, AMD) to understand the transformative impact of AI and hardware innovation on gaming and beyond. This session will delve into the evolution of AI from its early days of rack building to its current role in cloud-based production environments, highlighting the challenges of scaling AI for millions of players. Discover how emerging technologies like GPU acceleration, edge computing, and next-gen microprocessors are reshaping user experiences and game development.

The discussion will also address the integration of AI into gaming consoles, the future of local AI processing, and the broader implications of hardware advancements for industries like autonomous vehicles. Gain insights into data center & hardware leaders are driving innovation to meet the demands of the next decade. Don’t miss this thought-provoking conversation on the future of gaming and AI.

Bring a friend and enjoy a unique, hands-on gaming session. We'll be playing several of the games that Stone has created for his family over the past 15+ years. Build robot combatants, join in a rhythmic drum circle, destroy enemy castles, design your own monster, and more! Play by the rules, or make up your own. Stone will be there to teach the games, talk about their unique constraints, and answer any questions you may have. There is no formal presentation, so feel free to arrive and leave at any time during this session.

As AI transforms creative workflows and studio cultures, many women and female-identifying professionals in game development are facing new challenges and new forms of invisibility. Generative tools promise efficiency, but they also risk erasing nuance, authorship, and the human touch that has been hard won through decades of advocacy for inclusion and recognition.
In this roundtable, we’ll unpack the idea of AI Psychosis, a metaphor for the collective disorientation that can occur when studios prioritize machine output over human insight. We’ll discuss how this shift uniquely impacts women in creative, technical, and leadership roles. From loss of visibility in algorithm driven pipelines to emotional burnout from navigating AI accelerated expectations.
Hosted by the Women in Games SIG+, this session invites open dialogue about reclaiming creative identity, protecting equity gains, and leading with empathy in an AI-saturated landscape. Participants will share stories, strategies, and solutions for staying grounded, visible, and valued in the next evolution of game development.

The Animation Roundtable aims to bring all disciplines together under a common cause- how to best implement and improve the field of animation in game development. The following questions are among those that will be addressed:

Who should be directing the animation in a game? Who owns each part of the animation pipeline after export? How can all disciplines work together better, to bring the best looking and feeling animation to their game? What workflow frustrations have been experienced and how were they resolved? What new technologies are available or coming online that can help animators excel at their jobs, and what challenges will those technologies bring? What is your best tip or trick that you think everyone needs to hear? What mistakes have you made that you think others can learn from? How can we all give and take feedback better, from all disciplines?

In addition, this roundtable discussion will focus on helping newcomers by dedicating the last part of each session to them, encouraging questions to help them get prepared (or jump-started!) in their animation careers.

In Being an Effective Ally we discuss simple, everyday ways to support marginalized groups in their workplaces and communities. Participants learn techniques that work at the office, social events, conferences, and online. Attendees are encouraged to bring up personal experiences and hypothetical scenarios for group discussion. Being an Effective Ally is hosted by the IGDA Allies SIG.

Video games have become a mainstream entertainment medium, and with that comes an increasing diversity in gamers' gaming backgrounds. We are moving on from the previous debate of "what are games" to the reality of game devs needing to tailor their designs to players who are coming into the game spaces from different generations and levels of genre expertise.

In this series of microtalks, developers from various backgrounds will talk about lessons they’ve learned from their experiences matching their designs to potential players' experience and expectations, and the tools that have helped them onboard players for the maximum fun gameplay experience.

The team at Hypersect wanted to stand out from the competition with the art style of its tactical RPG, Never's End, by solving the problem of rendering a true 3D world as if it was hand-drawn 2D pixel art. In this session, Ryan Juckett (game director and lead engineer) will share details about the game's art pipeline and rendering technology powered by Hypersect's proprietary game engine. Characters and the environment are fully 3D modeled allowing a level of fidelity not possible in a true 2D sprite engine. While maintaining a hand-animated sprite illusion, Never's end allows for full camera control, dynamic lighting, complex materials such as liquids, skeletal based animation of dynamic clothing and weapons, and more.

As the industry bleeds talent from mass layoffs, it’s more crucial than ever to not only bring juniors onto teams, but also set them up for success so they can thrive and begin the path towards becoming seniors. In this panel, industry professionals Ashley Poprik, Emma Kidwell, Sarah Helen Slovak, Natalie Checo, and Samantha Low will inform seniors of the biggest problems that juniors face in the industry. Why is consistent and accurate titling so important? When are you ready to mentor a junior? Why is hiring marginalized talent vital to the health of the industry? These questions and more will be answered by a group of developers composed of both seniors and juniors.

This roundtable, led by career coach and former games executive Adam Hobbs, invites attendees to explore the realities of aging in the games industry. As layoffs, shifting technologies, and age bias disproportionately impact professionals over 40, many are questioning how to stay visible, relevant, and fulfilled in a youth-driven field. Through open dialogue and guided discussion prompts, participants share insights on navigating layoffs, reframing their experience, and designing sustainable mid-to-late career paths in games. Topics include consulting and fractional work, personal rebranding, and long-term career visioning. Whether currently employed, recently laid off, or considering a pivot, attendees walk away with new strategies, shared encouragement, and a deeper understanding of what’s possible after 40.

The Local Game Community Organizers roundtable is for people who are currently organizing events and communities in their areas for independent or professional game developers or people who are looking to start a game developer community. Organizing events and meetups for your local game development community can be a fun and rewarding experience that creates lasting friendships and memories for both organizers and participants. In building those communities, the organizers can often find themselves without a community of their own to lean on for knowledge and support. This roundtable invites games industry community organizers of all experience levels to come together, meet one another, learn from each other's experience in building and growing their respective communities and forming the basis for a support network for organizers around the world. In this roundtable, we will poll the group on topics that they are interested in discussing and then break into smaller groups based around those topics to have deeper discussions with the chance to switch groups to discuss different topics and make new connections.

This salon organizes and elevates the community of Asian gamer and gaming professionals across entertainment and media. After opening remarks and a short panel, we will dive deep in a group discussion.

The topics to discuss will range from:

* How we accelerate the growth and success of Asian talent and working professionals
* Improving representation in game art, design, stories, characters, worlds, and campaigns
* Building a vibrant community of gamers, designers, developers, artists, marketers, publishers, leaders and executives

Together, we can make a real difference and unlock the transformative power of games to improve how society views us.

This session, presented by Nathan Chen, Head of Technology at Tencent Games, will delve into the profound reshaping of the gaming industry by AI, based on insights and practical applications from Tencent Games' technology. He will provide a multi-faceted analysis of how AI fundamentally enhances the efficiency of digital content production, enables intelligent and refined operations management, and propels the evolution of gaming experiences towards new paradigms characterized by emotionally responsive NPCs and natural interaction.