Malindy’s Big GDC 2024 blog Part I: A Guide
As I previously threatened, this is part one of a two-part blog post about my time at GDC 2024. While both are ultimately meant for me to get my thoughts in order, this first part is designed to help those of you who haven’t been to GDC and who are considering it or just wondering about it. While this is my experience and can of course absolutely differ from anyone else’s, I just want to raise a few points that I hope will help someone in future!
GDC, held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, is doubtlessly the largest conference for professional game developer, visited, per its parent company informa, by up to 30.000 attendees annually. GDC offers panels, roundtables and an expo, which is essentially its tradeshow floor, where companies such as Unreal and Discord present their products, and universities colleges advertise towards potential students and lecturers. Some games are also available to play — notably, all IGF nominees offer a demo of their game at the IGF Pavilion, which includes student games which can otherwise be a bit difficult to get to.
To reflect these three quite different facets of the conference, GDC sells different passes at strikingly different price points — the All-Access Pass ($2,449), Core ($1,949), Summits ($1,299) and the Expo Pass ($399).
I got to attend GDC on an All-Access Pass, sponsored, along with a travel stipend, by the Game Devs of Colour Expo. The Game Devs of Colour Expo, which began during the pandemic, is a completely free, completely online collection of online panels by black developers, which is held every year. If you can, please support it in the way it has supported me and others, the work they do for the black game dev community is great. Devs, you can still get involved in this year’s edition!
First of all, I’m going to acknowledge what everyone already knows — these prices are fantasy numbers, designed to gate knowledge and increase the appeal of GDC. This is especially transparent when you look at the Core and Summits passes. Summits are the talks developers give all throughout the week, and the two passes make it seem as if there is a difference between sessions in quality or popularity or whatever, because while one pass allows you to visit the first two days of talks, the other gives you Wednesday to Friday. Of course, if there is a certain talk that so happens to take place on the last three days and nothing else interests you, then congrats, you’ve just saved almost $700 dollars, but in reality this is just GDC knowing people start flagging after the first two days and attend fewer talks as the week goes on, I’d wager. The All-Access pass is the only pass that includes access to the GDC Vault, GDC’s video archive of talks, which they say has a value of over $600. It does, absolutely, if you want to put a price tag on everything under the sun. Look, two wolves in me are fighting, one is the wolf that wants everyone to be fairly paid for their contribution, skills and years of hard work, the other wolf needs knowledge to be accessible for future generations. Only one of these wolves can read.
So, the cost of the passes themselves is prohibitive. GDC knows this, of course, this is why they have a page on how to convince your employer to pay for a pass for you. I mean, sure. Tax writeoff? But still, you’ll excuse me for scoffing. To the cost of the passes then comes the cost of getting to and being in San Francisco. As previously mentioned, my scholarship came with a travel stipend, a maximum of $1,000 if you could prove you needed it in full. In Euro after conversion, this left me with €900, of which I spent €616 on my return flight from Europe, booked roughly a month ahead of the event due to the time the scholarships were handed out. The rest went into my €566 hostel stay.
You’ll notice a problem! Yes, I knew I wouldn’t be able to go to GDC without my own investment. At the end of GDC, my credit card showed me -€1,312. Full transparency, this includes a visit to SFMOMA ($30), $210 in souvenirs (I went to Sephora, okay), a Day of the Devs hoodie ($60) and two extra weekends I spent in San Francisco for acclimatisation and sightseeing. Not included are the two outfits I bought ahead of time. You told me I was cute! It was an investment!
Everyone told me the cost of being in San Francisco was high, but I had no useful comparison for how high, honestly. I’m regularly in London, so I thought okay, well, how much worse can it be? Turns out much worse, actually! The cheapest meals I’ve meals I’ve had in San Francisco were a Burger King set meal ($14.70, no tip) and a really good tonkatsu from a ramen shop next to my hostel ($23 including tip, no drink). Now, I don’t exactly know how much inflation has influenced these prices lately, because eating out has become more expensive everywhere on earth. But to be faced with something $20 and $30 for any meal definitely was new to me. I skipped breakfast most days. For lunch, the Metereon, a small mall and food court across from the Moscone Center West Hall, has a good selection of fast food — Korean fried chicken, pizza slices, burgers, a good lil’ Poké bowl place, but it’s also so packed they run out of food during lunch hours. The Moscone Center is the biggest joke of all, selling you a small pizza for $20. It’s a conference centre pizza, so it’s okay at best and everyone knows it. $6 per drink. What I will recommend is the Trader Joe’s on Mission & 4th, I didn’t know Trader Joe’s was basically an American Aldi/Lidl equivalent, and it’s the reason I didn’t end up dying of scurvy.
Look, I digress, but the point is, I kept costs down thanks to the generosity of my friends. I got invited to dinner most evenings and there was usually someone with a drink or a snack handy. These were people who were either incredibly generous with their own money or could expense stuff. I will be honest and admit I came to rely on them a fair bit and would probably not have made the week without them. Evan, if you’re reading this, love is a bag of plantain chips and a cup of water. Felix, spicy noodles save lives. But this isn’t how you should get through a conference.
The second reason that speaks against GDC is San Francisco itself. This, again, is probably something you’ve heard others say, but it was another “ah, I get it now” moment for me. People call San Francisco fake — apparently it used to be a regular, affordable city before tech dudes came and were like aha, an affordable city, let’s use that for our purposes, and now it’s a place people go to work, and not a city people live, and I don’t know what it is, but you can feel that. Not just in the prices. It’s just very difficult to find rest in San Francisco. As a European, in the US for the first time, I found it unfathomable how no one seemed to walk, which brings me to Uber as another expense. I stayed at a hostel a good 40 minutes away from downtown San Francisco, and a Muni bus pass at $5 for an entire day is a steal. But I was so confused by the buses because San Francisco hasn’t managed to find one definite system to tell you were a bus stop is and which direction the bus is going, that at night, I was happy whenever someone packed me into an Uber instead, even though that was also stressful — I’d never used the app before. A sign next to the bus stop with line numbers and directions, San Francisco! Is that so hard? Not a tree, not a lamp post with tape, not ‘Bus Stop’ written on the ground. Do I have to flag the bus down? Do I have to click in and out? Just tell me. (The answer is you use the physical or digital card called Clipper card for travel in the San Francisco area on buses operated by Muni, Muni also has an app now that you immediately can buy tickets on, including day passes. You will need the Clipper on BART trains or buses operated by Golden Gate Transit, Golden Gate transit buses aren’t listed on most bus stops although they do stop there, they just appear as if by magic. Google maps helps. You get in at the front of Golden Gate Transit buses and you need to click in and out. Price is determined by distance, if you forget to click out, that’s $11.40. [Don’t be Malindy. Click out.] You can also use Clipper on Google Pay now, another thing I’ve never done before and which was a bit like magic)
People have mentioned the homelessness problem as another point against San Francisco — in San Francisco, the disparity between rich and poor hits you like nothing else. I don’t know how someone can go to the city and not want to change the state of the US, fundamentally and immediately. To be homeless in San Francisco suffer visibly in a way I hadn’t experienced before; they cry and wail, they talk to themselves and curse out no one, they are physically in appalling shape. I was strongly advised not to enter the Tenderloin, essentially stretch of about 2 km where homelessness seems to be concentrated. I didn’t feel unsafe in San Francisco, however. I know this sounds like a bit of a race to the bottom, but I lived in Manchester. I live with poverty and homelessness. I hope when people mention homelessness as a point against GDC, what they’re saying is that a city like San Francisco, which increased homelessness and then refused to engage with the people it displaced, should not be rewarded with the economic influx GDC brings. I hope they’re saying that and not “ew, homeless”. To be honest, I wasn’t always sure.
So, with all of this in mind, why the fuck did I go to GDC? I mean, first off, I didn’t know and/or believe most of this ;D. But my main reason for wanting to go to GDC in the first place was painful, ouch, ouch FOMO. I think attending GDC can feel a bit like a legitimisation, the same way E3 used to be for many journalists. There are of course a lot of game developers who can’t attend GDC, or simply don’t want to, and the ridiculous price of admission is just one possible reason why. I really wanted the full experience that the pass would give me, even though most people don’t have that “full” experience — they can’t afford this pass, so they just come for the expo, or they come with no pass at all. I attended a lot of summits, 10 in total, and I’ve been trying to watch one video from the GDC Vault a day. The vault holds so much knowledge, and knowing a talk will be uploaded also frees you up on a day that would get stressful otherwise.
When I first became interested in attending, I went and asked other game developers their reasons for going, and there is quite a spectrum of reasons to consider. For many, the conference is mainly a way to meet their colleagues and interact with them face to face, and it can absolutely feel as if just for one week, everyone is there. Some people are there to talk to potential funding partners. Some developers hold talks because they have a game coming out and want to increase their visibility, others are between games and hold a talk to stay visible. Some people, believe it or not, enjoy giving talks, and a lot of people come to network.
While these are the most common reasons I came across, you of course have to decide for yourself why you go. Besides FOMO, I’m between jobs right now and thought networking couldn’t hurt, being between jobs also made me feel very disconnected from the industry, (despite a lot of people having lost their jobs recently, of course), and the job centre accepted me going to GDC as a job seeking measure of sorts, despite me telling my clerk that this wouldn’t work (more on that later). In short, I felt, in order to stay hopeful given the current state of my career and the industry at large, I should attend, even though I honestly went back and forth on it a lot.
The thing is just this — people will absolutely tell you it’s not worth to go and then still attend, which is of course confusing as hell. I can also not give you a definitive assessment of whether going to GDC is worth it, because you shouldn’t listen to me, anyway, way too much responsibility, and because a strong personal reason can make up for so much, depending on your priorities. After the first day, Sunday for me, because I attended Day of the Devs, I was ready to leave. I was actively looking into it. However, and this is what Part II of this far too long blog is going to be about, I have friends and colleagues I am so grateful for and that I was so, so glad to meet. I hated people saying this during the pandemic, “you have to see people”, used as a way to legitimise spending 5 days a week at an office, but boy, do you sometimes have to see people. I felt shit about myself and my career and my visibility when I arrived, and when I left San Francisco a week later, I did not. To me, that was absolutely worth it. That being said, if you’re not as connected and you get anxious, try to get a conference buddy so you’re not slumming it alone, even if it’s just someone you can check in with for lunch now and again.
These are all the hard facts I can think of which influenced my first GDC visit, Part II will be about the most important thing of all, the question I got asked like no other — “but Malindy, how was your GDC?”
If there’s anything else you want to know about the logistics of my GDC visit, feel free to reach out!