The Game Developers Conference will be fully digital for the second year in a row, manager Katie Stern announced on Thursday.
GDC 2021 will provide a family line of educational and business presentations from developers, the Game Developers Choice Awards and the Independent Games Festival, as well as some new attractions. Instead of the event taking place over a single week, conference organizers are planning the content that will take place during the year.
The GDC Masterclass (March 4-5), presented last fall, is a series of one or two-day workshops that provide hands-on training on the challenges of the gaming industry, as opposed to more practical presentations.
The GDC Showcase (March 15th to 19th) will be a free digital event, with lectures, Ask-Me-Anything sessions with developers, interactive panels, podcasts and more.
In addition to all the new material, the actual GDC 2021, including the family series of exclusive lectures for games and business development events, will take place from 19 to 23 July.
Additional events with the GDC brand are also planned for the end of 2021, with Stern promising more information in the future. Conference organizers are also planning to publish their annual State of the Game Industry survey, which provides data on industry employment, technology and business trends, as well as measures of diversity and accessibility.
The Game Developers Conference (along with PAX East) was one of the first games industry events during 2020 to suffer the effects of the COVID-19 shutdowns. With big companies like Sony, Microsoft, Epic Games and others retiring due to security concerns, the 2020 event was eventually postponed and converted into a fully digital event. The event remains one of the industry’s biggest worker gatherings, attracting more than 29,000 people in 2019.
Conference organizers also published a report after the event was canceled last year, detailing how industry workers felt that the COVID-19 pandemic impacted their work. The report found that one in three developers had their game delayed due to the pandemic.
Joseph Knoop is a writer / producer / guy who cries in all GDC for IGN.