GDC 2022 featured over 1,000 speakers across over 600 lectures, workshops, and roundtable discussions and networking events.
The 2022 Game Developers Conference has come to a close, and what an incredible event it was—with 17,000 people turning out in-person and virtually for a week of sessions, networking, and connections.
It was the largest conference in San Francisco in the past two years. A total of 12,000 game industry professionals attended the in-person event at the Moscone Center and 5,000 more joined on the GDC virtual platform, which was available to increase attendee accessibility. The conference prioritized health and safety for all in-person attendees, requiring proof of vaccination and face masks to be worn indoors.
GDC 2022 featured over 1,000 speakers across over 600 lectures, workshops, and roundtable discussions and networking events, physically reuniting the game dev community. More than 200 exhibitors showcased their newest technologies, software, and services on the GDC Expo Floor, including industry leaders such as Amazon, AMD, ARM, Google, Nintendo, Unity, Wemade, and more. The Expo Floor also provided attendees with the opportunity to play some of the most exciting and boundary-pushing independent games, meet the developers at the Independent Games Festival Pavilion, and experience the uniquely experimental games of the alt.ctrl.GDC exhibit that is home to games that use alternative controllers.
The conference featured sessions full of insights from some of the biggest names in electronic entertainment. Josh Wardle, creator of the international phenomenon Wordle, gave a talk on how he created, grew and sold the ubiquitous word game, with a focus on all the mistakes made along the way to its status as a huge hit. Top voices spoke on learnings from the creation of hit games including: Baldur's Gate 3, Clash of Clans, Horizon Forbidden West, Life is Strange: True Colors, Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, Psychonauts 2, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, Sable, the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser experience at Disney World, classics such as Wolfenstein 3D and Q-bert, and much more.
A centerpiece of GDC was the multi-part presentation “GDC Main Stage: The Developer's Renaissance,” which focused on the future of game development and the evolving workplace with esteemed speakers from Eidos-Montréal, PlayStation Studios, and Devolver Digital/DeepWell DTx. The speakers discussed finding the right balance in a remote/hybrid work environment, taking a stronger approach to addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace, and empowering developers to “kill it with kindness.”
GDC 2022 celebrated the top developers of the past year with the 24th annual IGF Awards and the 22nd annual Game Developers Choice Awards. Daniel Mullins Games’ genre-bending, deckbuilding roguelike game, Inscryption, made history by being the first game ever to win both the Seumas McNally Grand Prize in the IGF Awards and the Game of the Year Award in the Game Developers Choice Awards in the same night.
“It’s been an honor to reunite the exceptional video game development community at GDC 2022 and to share in the love for games and each other that has brought so many people to San Francisco this week,” said Katie Stern, who oversees the GDC as VP of Entertainment Media at Informa Tech. “The learnings, accomplishments and people that have made up GDC 2022, have made it clear that the video game industry community is stronger than ever and we’re already so excited for what is to come in GDC 2023.”
GDC will be returning to the Moscone Convention Center March 20-24, 2023. The call for submissions for GDC 2023 will open this summer.
GDC returns to San Francisco in 2023! For more information, be sure to visit our website.
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Game Developer and GDC are sibling organizations under Informa Tech.
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