This article was originally published on March 6, 2026 - read the full issue

By Rob Fahey

The 2026 Game Developers Conference kicks off next week in San Francisco amidst conversations about the role, relevance, and future of the event – conversations that may not be new but now involve asking harder questions than ever before.

For as long as I can remember, every year's GDC has been accompanied by a muttering of discontent, largely from developers who felt excluded by the event's high costs and, for those from many non-western countries, by the difficulty of getting an appropriate US visa to attend.

In part, that discontent has been a symbol of GDC's success, or at least of the image it has projected. The event is pitched as being incredibly valuable to professional development and peer networking, so those who cannot attend due to cost or visa issues feel justifiably aggrieved at missing such opportunities. From that perspective, GDC is just another issue tilting an already unbalanced playing field.

The obvious challenge facing this year's event is that all of those factors have been turned up to 11. Attendance costs are higher than ever, in the middle of a painful drought in industry funding opportunities, while a torrent of news stories in countries around the globe have hammered home that travelling to the United States is now a fraught and potentially risky process, even for those who previously sauntered through its borders with ease.

Neither problem is GDC's fault, but the issues are made far more painful than they need to be by the event's long-standing decision not to stray from the Bay Area – which since 2007 has meant San Francisco's Moscone Centre. Calls to move the event to somewhere more accessible to a wider range of developers have fallen on deaf ears over the years; it's now firmly anchored in its (terribly expensive) home and couldn't entertain the possibility of a move to more hospitable climes, such as a Canadian city, without risking appearing – God forbid – political.

The consequence, among international attendees at least, is that many people seem to have decided to give the event a miss this year. It's not just individual choices, either; quite a few overseas companies seem to have decided either to skip the show or at least to send fewer staff than usual. We won't know for sure until the event gets under way, of course, but it will in all likelihood be a far less international affair than it has been in the past.

The cancellation of Hideo Kojima's keynote at the event has been held up as a kind of poster child for that shift, which is rather unfair. The sudden nature of the cancellation almost certainly means it was just down to an unforeseen scheduling clash. To be clear, also, GDC's organisers appear to reject the basic hypothesis here, claiming that ticket sales have shown no untoward impacts this year.

Yet GDC's own research supports the notion that there's a problem; the GDC State of the Game Industry survey published at the end of January suggested that almost two thirds of international respondents had either cancelled or were reconsidering travel plans to the United States.

The real heart of the matter, however, may lie in the question of whether those who decide to skip GDC in the current climate are open to returning if and when things improve. Or whether breaking the pattern of attendance will end up being permanent.

To that question, one striking factor is that few of the people I've spoken to who are skipping the event this year found the decision particularly difficult, with the most commonly mentioned regrets being about various dinners and get-togethers that happen around the show, not anything they'll miss at GDC itself.

A key problem seems to be that despite GDC always hosting some genuinely excellent talks (especially in the technical tracks) which set it apart from other industry events, the conference overall has arguably allowed itself to be dominated by successive waves of monied grifters. It's been years since I attended GDC in person, but hearing about the extent to which blockchain and NFT outfits spent heavily to buy the industry's attention at the show eradicated all regret on that front. Even before this year's event started, you could already feel a sense of weary inevitability about AI chancers splashing out their VC dollars for the same purposes.

An expensive and sometimes inaccessible event that provides genuine, irreplaceable value to its attendees can survive a lot. An expensive and sometimes inaccessible event that often seems to feel like you've paid a lot of money to be marketed to by snake-oil salesmen is on thinner ice by far.

Perhaps the international attendance figures next week will prove all of these fears unfounded, but it certainly seems likely that GDC's position as a global event will be diminished – and the next few years don't look any less challenging on that front.

You could argue that an irony of the internet age is that by connecting us all so easily, it has made the major global conferences and events of the past less relevant and necessary. Nonetheless, it would be a shame to see GDC become a more parochial, largely US-centric event. It's no bad thing to see regional developer events flourishing in many parts of the world, but this is a global industry with a global market, and in its best moments GDC has been the town square of that industry. But, pending the assessment of next week's show, it does seem unlikely that that spirit can be recaptured without some major changes of approach – and venue.

This article was originally published on March 6, 2026 - read the full issue