As is now tradition at large games events, we like to take a quick tour of the show, see which companies have splashed the cash and what that tells us about the event and the games business itself.
At-the-show sentiment about GDC seemed to be mixed. There’s the obvious prohibitive cost, which led several folks I spoke to during the week to attend without a badge and just do meetings in the surrounding area.
One person described the expo show floor as “sad” compared to the pre-COVID glory days, while another noted the rising number of companies skipping GDC entirely or holding events outside of Moscone.
The prime example here was Xsolla, which did have a huge presence in the West Hall entrance, but also booked out all of the nearby Howard hotel to host and hold meetings.
Netflix also booked out the whole fourth floor of the nearby Metreon for its gaming event, but did not appear to have a presence at all at the Moscone.
To the show itself: Xbox has a very visible spot at the Moscone South entrance, and Databricks is also likely picking up some solid footfall further along by the front doors.
Head down to the expo floor and you see that Meta has the ‘first thing you see as you come down the escalator’ spot. AWS and Keywords are in the other most prominent spots to the right, and servers.com and Vicon are to the left.
Behind that, Tencent has a big stand – and as two different people have specifically noted, Wales, the country, is in a plum spot right next to the world’s biggest game company.
Perforce, Tencent-owned Lightspeed and webgame portal Poki are nearby too, while Ark maker Snail Games also has a very large screen on its booth (and also sent lots of emails to attendees about its party, it seems).
Newly-rebranded QA firm Side had a neat and colourful booth and New York State also spent a few quid nearby.
Walk towards Moscone North on the show floor and Arbitrum and Inworld have claimed the bigger booths on offer. There’s also the slightly random addition of Sony and Honda’s car collab, Afeela, which actually looks pretty cool.
In amongst the various nations’ trade bodies – Poland, India, Italy and so on – there’s a strikingly large screen for a game called The Bustling World, and further down in the GDC Play and IGF Pavilion it’s mostly PC, of course.
Though we did spot an AI-powered virtual pet mobile game from Starward Games, and a bright tactical puzzler called Tectonic Tactics.
Finally, kudos to the guy roaming around dressed very convincingly as the lead character in Black Myth: Wukong.
And more generally, in keeping with the restrained vibe of the show floor, there were relatively few people dressed up around the show.
While there were a few top hats knocking about, sadly we did not spot anyone with a pair of those steampunky goggles resting on their head, usually a staple of any good games event.
