✍️ What I Learned At GDC 2025
GDC 2025 is a wrap! It was a great week full of friends, games, and good times.
Here are some thoughts from my 11th (I think) Game Developers Conference:
1) There's still funding money 💰
It feels like every other day I hear that publishing money has dried up. Then I get publisher interest in my inbox, and hear that fellow developer friends are getting the same.
What's going on?
Publishers themselves receive hundreds (or thousands) of pitches, but they can only sign a tiny fraction of games. So the vast majority of games won't get deals, making those the most numerous stories.
Beyond receiving pitches, publishers need to find the best games to publish. It's cheap (free) to inquire about a game, but actually signing a deal is a different story. It's part of their job to reach out, but the number of open slots for games to sign remains the same.
I'm sure that the budget range for a particular game makes a huge difference.
Obviously I won't name any names, but one developer I talked to at a bar said their budget was $1,500,000-$2,500,000 for a team of 5-7, for a 3-5 year development cycle. They seemed to be getting publisher interest and had high hopes for a deal. (I'm not trying to be gossipy, just to give you a feel for the space.)
One great talk I saw was Funding Futures Series: Inception Publishing: The Shift to Indie Self-Publishing. This particular session was focused on the many benefits of self-publishing (how and why to do it), but some members of the panel were also publishers (or investors).
Funding Futures Series: Inception Publishing: The Shift to Indie Self-Publishing
Take Victoria Tran, for example, who's helping to run OuterSloth, the investment fund from InnerSloth (the developers of hit game Among Us). I'm paraphrasing here, but Victoria basically said, "We just give you money."
We want to fund your game. We don’t want to publish your game. We don’t want your IP. We just want to see fun, original, and clever games get made.
Outersloth
It seems suspect, even impossible, but yes, money is often given away to game developers to make their game. They're called developer funds. OuterSloth's generous model is what happens when terrific people achieve amazing success.
They recognize that they earned an embarrassment of riches, and want to pay it forward. The arts supporting the arts. It's beautiful.
SUPERHOT sp. z o.o.
SUPERHOT PRESENTS is another developer fund.
Of course, publishers are different from developer funds, but at GDC I felt the presence of both. I got the sense that both types of entities were ready to put money down and work with indie game developers. Things seem grim online, but in real life they felt more hopeful. Time will tell what the reality is.
Indie Fund is another one. 52 games funded so far.
2) Giving a GDC talk is a lot of work 🎙️
I probably spent 3 weeks on my talk Content-Ready Game Development. My time is usually split on different projects, but certainly this talk was my main focus for the couple weeks leading up to the conference.
On the website they suggest spending at least 20 hours on your talk, and I think I overshot that.
My first takeaway is: your talk is probably longer than you think it is! At least for me, I was (supposed) to target about 20 minutes, but the first time I gave the talk, it was 33 minutes! 😱
By the time you're ready to give your talk, you'll probably be sick of it. After practicing it several times, it starts to lose its luster. It might become less fun to you, and the content might start to feel "obvious" because you're so familiar with the material.
However, it's new to everyone else! Certainly you know the content quite well, but your talk is hopefully fresh and exciting to your audience.
Here's how to get a talk into GDC:
- Subscribe to their newsletter to get notified when proposals are being accepted
- Submit a talk that feels "needed" by your community. Something helpful!
- (Hopefully, get accepted!)
- Read Chris Zukowski's article How to give a really great GDC talk
- Iterate on the talk with your advisor
- Practice the talk LIVE several times, getting feedback, and improving
- Book a test room to ensure your computer works with their equipment
- Give a great talk! You're gonna do fine, don't sweat it
Naturally, I mentioned my book at the beginning and end of my talk. Which taught me that:
3) Game developers buy lots of books at GDC 📚
My book sold out! Of course, I only brought 21 copies (an odd number, I know).
It's like a mini-game: you have to guess how many copies you'll sell. If you guess too low, you could miss out on sales. Guess too high, and you've gotta lug your unsold copies home on an airplane. Tough call. Good gameplay! 🎮
Not only did the book sell out, but the bookstore manager (who was a pleasure to interact with) asked that I bring twice as many books next year! I mean, that's ideal, right? How could that have gone any better??
(I think the main reason it sold well is that it's far cheaper than many books.)
4) GDC remains expensive 💸
If you wanna go, get out your wallet!
A decent hotel for the whole week could easily run over $2,000. (I usually stay less than the entire week to help with this.)
Lunch for one was over $25/day. A single can of soda was $7.25!
Also, San Francisco is kind of a strange choice. No judgement or anything, but it can be confusing to navigate, has some risky areas to avoid, is densely populated, and yeah, super expensive! (I'm quite fond of it, but I hear the complaints.)
The airport is also 30-45 minutes from Moscone Center, where GDC takes place. I've heard grumblings from developers hoping that they'd move it somewhere more accessible, but they've probably gotta sign the contracts years in advance, so who knows if/when that'll ever happen.
✈️ So, should you go?
If you're on the fence, then honestly it might be worth skipping! Sometimes in life if your answer isn't, "Definitely YES!" then your answer should be, "Nah".
We've got games to make, after all, and we can get a lot done in that week. Plus, all that money for the trip could go into your game! Maybe book more artist time, get better assets, or reserve a spot in an online showcase or something.
All that said, my actions speak loudly for me. I've been going steadily since 2014 and had perhaps the best experience of my career last week. So I obviously find it to be a worthwhile event (but it's easy for me because I live in California).
Here's to many more! 🛠️
Naturally I gotta link to How to do GDC again, because I spent so much time on it 😭
