GDC Conference Attendance Expected to Surpass 2010’s, Director Says

Registration for next week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco was “already at where we were last year” at the same time, Director Meggan Scavio told Consumer Electronics Daily on Tuesday. “We are definitely expecting to surpass last year,” she said. “I know it will be a record-breaking year,” but “just by how much we're not sure yet,” she said. About 18,000 people attended in 2010, she said.

To accommodate the expected larger turnout, GDC will this year be held in all three buildings of the Moscone Center, Scavio said. GDC was just in the north and south buildings last year, she said. There was “over-capacity in so many rooms last year,” with many attendees not able to fit in rooms for some presentations, she said. While there are about the same number of sessions this year, capacity has grown, with three rooms able to accommodate 1,100 people compared to only two rooms last year able to accommodate up to 1,000 people, she said.

GDC has become “more accessible to a wider variety of game developers now,” especially with its Social and Online Games Summit and the first Smartphone Summit being held during it, Scavio said. The two-day Smartphone Summit is replacing last year’s iPhone Games Summit, which in turn replaced GDC Mobile from years past, she said. What’s happening in that market “is very interesting” and it didn’t make sense to continue focusing solely on iPhone games due to the growing popularity of games on Android devices, she said. “Within the last year, Google made a lot of inroads with Android, and it really didn’t seem appropriate to call” that summit the iPhone Summit “anymore because the Android platform was such a viable device for people to program for, as well as BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7, she said.

"It’s really become a five-day show now,” Scavio said, and the passes that people are buying for GDC “reflect that.” Attendees are now coming “for the entire week” due to all the information being provided in the summits on Monday and Tuesday, ahead of the official start of the main GDC conference on Wednesday, she said.

The improved state of the overall game industry also is helping to boost expected attendance, said Scavio. “As the industry grows so does GDC, and when the industry suffers GDC suffers,” as it did in 2009 “during the recession,” which she called “the low point for everyone, including us.” GDC attendance and “seeing who shows up at GDC is a really good indication of how healthy the industry is,” she said, calling 2011 “a big year” for the game industry.

As Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences President Martin Rae did ahead of his organization’s Design Innovate Create Entertain (D.I.C.E.) Summit in Las Vegas early this month (CED Feb 8 p3), Scavio said she believed game industry members were more upbeat now than a year ago. Of the continued industry job cuts even early this year, she said: “We see those every year, don’t we?” What often happens is that after a major game ships, the company doesn’t “have a plan for anyone anymore,” she said. But game makers are “learning how to make games in a different way so they're not relying on that long development cycle” including a year or two to make a game and then little clarity on what to do after that, she said. More companies are making games now for smartphones and for Facebook, and “they're expanding their own markets to accommodate other gamers” and also “keep themselves alive,” she said. “I think everyone is adapting to the changes in the market.”

Facebook game maker Zynga “being so successful has inspired a lot of people to think outside of the box,” Scavio said, pointing to that company as one that’s been growing significantly. Also, “over the last year you've seen an attitude shift” in the industry over social games, which are now being respected more by “hardcore gamers” and “traditional game developers,” she said. “A lot of those people are making social games” for the first time, and they're making them more “mainstream acceptable,” she said.

This year’s GDC, ending March 4, is celebrating the event’s 25th anniversary, Scavio said. Helping to mark the occasion, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata will talk about “the last 25 years of Nintendo’s success” in his Wednesday keynote, she said. “We're bringing back the founder of our event” also, Chris Crawford, now chief technology officer of software company Storytron, who will be speaking at GDC on Thursday morning, Scavio said.

What could, however, wind up stealing some of the attention from GDC on Wednesday is a planned San Francisco news briefing by Apple at which it’s expected to take the wraps off a new version of its iPad. Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment by our deadline about its event, expected to be held at about the same time as the GDC keynote and right next door.