GDC Day 4: Facebook, Unreal and IGDA controversy

An Epic interview on HTML5 support, a Unity interview on platform partnerships, an IGF booth hijacking, and the IGDA's response to its controversial party mark Day 4 of GDC 2013 news coverage. GDC 2013 is running Monday, March 25th through Friday, March 29th at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California. Gamasutra is onsite to cover the event in its entirety, and the following are some of the fourth-day, can't-miss highlights: - Facebook's director of game partnerships Sean Ryan talked about what the social network is doing to attract developers, and make them want to create Facebook games in 2013. - Unity CEO David Helgason spoke with Gamasutra about its partnerships with Sony, Nintendo, and Facebook, and how the company continues to make sure its engine is elegant and works on all those platforms. - Tim Sweeney and Mark Rein sat down to talk about what HTML5 support means for Epic, where the platform is going, and whether rich browser games could be threatening to hardware makers. - IGF Grand Prize winner Cart Life's booth was spraypainted and hijacked by another game -- thanks to Cart Life creator Richard Hofmeier himself. Learn about the Twine game that's "really dear" to him. - Independent game designer Jason Rohrer won the tenth and final Game Design Challenge Championship at this year's GDC. The theme of this year's challenge was 'Humanity's Last Game.' - IGDA offered an official response to its controversial GDC party with "scantily-clad female dancers" by stating "One of the core values of the IGDA is encouraging inclusion and diversity. Obviously we need to be more vigilant in our efforts." - Lastly, the Official GDC Podcast had personalities such as Michael Pachter (Industry Analyst), Porpentine (Howlings Dogs), Chris Remo (Doublefine), Leigh Alexander (Gamasutra editor-at-large) discussing what they could do with $20, tiny games, two-player games, making people attractive, game narrative, getting jobs, hugging games and depression. These are just a handful of the notable GDC 2103 lectures covered to date. All related GDC news can be found on the special Gamasutra GDC coverage page, which is being updated regularly throughout the week. Those interested in purchasing passes to GDC 2013 may still do so onsite. For more information on GDC 2013, visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.