GDC 2026 was unlike any other, thanks to AI and layoffs

Growing up in the aughts in San Francisco, I always had the distinct sense that the party was over. Whatever flame burned in defiance of the AIDS crisis was marked on Google Maps as a popular tourist destination. Gentrification had already won and was busy cramming a dozen immigrants into a single apartment. A new fight for the soul of the city was underway, but most of us fortunate enough to have a computer class were too young and too busy playing Mario Teaches Typing to understand what was happening.

Now, as an adult returning to San Francisco to attend the Game Developers Conference this year, it seems that the party isn’t over at all. It’s just walled off, filled with trendy vending trucks, and plastered with advertisements for products exclusively aimed at CEOs. Anyone is welcome. All you need is a few thousand dollars, a strong ability to compartmentalize, and a QR code.

The yearly event, which spans a week and hosts countless talks about the art and craft of making video games, is one I’ve attended many times. The Moscone Center, where the convention is held, is a complex that spiritually falls somewhere between airport and secret lair in a sci-fi movie.

As I made my way to the hotel after landing, I looked in awe at the streets of San Francisco. I had just arrived from Minnesota, where the warming winter weather had just revealed a dead squirrel that had been decomposing in my front yard for who knows how long. I don’t know what’s in the cement in San Francisco, but the streets around Moscone literally glimmer.

Some aspects of GDC are the same as ever. The event remains a continual attestation that it is impossible to wear a backpack and a lanyard together, as an adult, gracefully. But unlike a consumer-facing event like PAX, or the advertiser-driven spectacle of a show like The Game Awards, GDC has always carefully threaded a needle. There’s never been a time when GDC hasn’t, on some level, felt tasteless and absurd. As always, you cannot talk about GDC without talking about the Bay Area. You cannot talk about the Bay Area, nexus of our current tech oligarchy nightmare, without talking about class divides. GDC is and always will be a microcosm for our current moment.

GDC attendees hang outside one of the Moscone Center buildings.

GDC takes place a couple of blocks from a shopping area where every individual storefront has a guard. They don’t have much to do. Beyond the occasional convention attendees who mistakenly orient their Google Maps arrow, these areas are eerily empty during the week. It’s like when you play a good open-world game; no matter how realistically the buildings or NPCs have been programmed, you can’t fully suspend your disbelief. Could anyone truly live here?

At GDC, you can count on some constants. There are always talks that teach or invigorate you, like the one I attended where a panelist passionately advocated the importance of preserving bad games. I was also fond of an anti-cheat talk where developers described an eternal game of cat-and-mouse against human-like computer programs.

As with any convention, there’s always a point during GDC where you discover that an exciting talk description has totally bamboozled you. This year’s Marvel Rivals breakdown, for example, was listed as the “untold story” of the game’s launch and creation. Instead, it was mostly a marketing lead congratulating themselves for being a part of such a successful game.

There are surprising talks, like the one where an audio engineer warned an unwitting audience that he was going to unleash an unholy recording of his actual diarrhea. He rigged the area around his toilet and everything. In the most ironic way possible, he was arguing for the value of making creative works that are never meant to be seen by other people.

A slide at the GDC 2026 Indie Soapbox panel, where one developer argued about the importance of making ugly video game characters.

And of course, there are always talks championing some newfangled technology that’s going to save us all. As my colleague Gio noted in another piece about GDC, this year everything revolved around AI. Chinese publisher Tencent alone held around a dozen AI-related talks. The verdict? AI is the inevitable future of the industry. It’s a tool that will save people an extraordinary amount of time. You can now focus on the creative bits and leave the boring stuff to the computer.

What was never fully explained in any of the talks I attended was why efficiency should be the ruling mandate of the game industry. Is the process not the point? When you get down to it, what separates a generic dollar-store cup and an artisan mug is the toil. Is the value in producing better art, or is it in ensuring a product can be made on a predictable schedule? I heard multiple people describe how much AI made a difference in their work pipeline, and I believed everything I heard. It’s true: Some problems are so complex, and require processing such vast amounts of data, that the task might otherwise be impossible to complete. The topic was as inescapable, yet still unconvincing on a more fundamental level.

In half of the AI talks, it felt like the panelists were being forced to sing the praises of something they’d never otherwise talk about unprompted. Like, imagine someone telling you how great it is to eat spaghetti with a fork. Paradoxically, many of the talks I sat through insisted the technology was both revolutionary and also not that advanced. Don’t worry about it!

GDC is a weeklong event, and attendees who don’t get worn out by the daytime bustle often explore beyond the two-block radius of the Moscone Center. But even if they stay near their hotel, inevitably, GDC visitors will encounter the unhoused. For many, it’s a shock. I’ve spoken to people who don’t understand why “no one” is doing anything about the problem. And sure, California has the highest population of unhoused people in the nation — but rates for San Francisco have fallen in recent years. To me, it seems more like the city has successfully lulled the tech industry. Any time white-collar workers in this environment have to confront reality, they don’t know what to do with the discomfort. GDC is a great place to witness huge masses of people avert the gaze of an outstretched hand. Have you heard? No one can afford RAM.

In other respects, this GDC was unlike any other I’ve attended. The relentless threat of layoffs clung to the air like a thick miasma. In previous years, GDC felt like a nerdy celebration for the brightest minds of the video game industry. In 2026, the quietest moments at GDC were mournful. Half the people I know are out of a job right now, and GDC is an expensive event if you’re not comped a ticket. Even GDC’s keynote speaker made a plea directly to industry executives against layoffs this year.

This was also the year when a number of international game developers opted out of the event due to the overly aggressive immigration policies of the Trump administration. Familiar faces were replaced with spry youngsters debating what class load might help them get a job in the video game industry.

That churn has always haunted the game industry, but this was the first time I was reminded of that reality by a convention. When I first started writing about games, tricky subjects like race, gender, and class seemed like they were on the verge of being taken seriously by entities with power, like publishers. Over a decade later, attending a talk about how poorly a big-budget video game handled some type of representation, I felt exasperated. How many times was I going to sit through this talk over the years? I’m glad people are still carrying the mantle, and it is courageous when American politics currently punish any semblance of “woke.” But damn, y’all. I’m tired.

That sense of déjà vu lined many of the panels and conversations I had at GDC. Take, for example, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. The talks for the French game were extraordinarily popular, and the source of some of the biggest lines I saw at the show. You never had to walk far to hear people singing its praises at GDC. But however much the game deserves the praise, part of me sits in disbelief. Is the industry that began in garages and distributed games on floppy discs really “rediscovering” the value of smaller-scope projects?

Sandfall Interactive receives the Game of the Year award at GDC 2026.

Perhaps the best representation of the changing tides at GDC, an event that has recently started promoting itself to people outside of game development, is the fate of the Yerba Buena Gardens. This stretch of greenery, located between the event buildings, has traditionally not been an official part of the convention. If anything, the gardens were where people went to experience the anti-GDC. People who couldn’t afford to go to the event — or didn’t want to go — would hang out here and set up casual picnics. The Gardens also hosted the Lost Levels, a chaotic occasion where anyone could host a talk on any subject. Basically, if you wanted to find the queer or non-white segment of the game industry at GDC, you’d probably end up touching grass at Yerba Buena.

The Gardens still aren’t an officially sanctioned GDC space. But this year, GDC asserted its presence on the communal lawns. Areas were fenced in and filled with tents full of vendors. While the space is open to all, this year the gardens were only open during specific hours of the day. Whatever semblance of punk the gardens once had was dead, as game developers anxiously stuck to their own friend groups outside the convention.

Inside GDC, there are mini-areas that host everything from tabletop games to tech demos. Esoteric services and software plant their flags with booths that would be right at home inside Mass Effect’s Citadel. My favorite area had to be the Xbox mini museum, which proudly displayed over two decades’ worth of bright green history. Fun fact: The first Xbox prototype was a chrome X-shaped box. I walked by the display many times during the few days I was at the show, and not once did I ever see anyone inside the Xbox exhibit, outside of the guard being paid to stand there.

That apparent lack of foot traffic perfectly encapsulates the identity crisis the Xbox brand faces as Microsoft begins teasing its next generation of consoles. If anything is an Xbox, then nothing is an Xbox. Like many others, I sat through the Microsoft talk that revealed a little bit more about Project Helix. I left with a list of buzzwords that only further convinced me that no one needs another Xbox — or PlayStation, for that matter. For the few developers working on demanding games with a clear vision, extra processing power is a boon. Otherwise, the world could probably make do with fewer mega games.

“And my art can’t / be supported until it is / gigantic, bigger than / everyone else’s, confirming / the audience’s feeling that they are / alone,” Eileen Myles wrote in her famous 1991 work, “An American Poem.” In it, Myles describes the rampant inequality festering within New York City, the home of businessmen and starving artists. Decades later, she might as well be talking about the dissonance of attending GDC in San Francisco. “That they alone / are good, deserved / to buy the tickets / to see this Art.”

For all my grousing, I left GDC feeling energized. The domain of video game creation is notoriously secretive… until it becomes a talk at the conference. There’s still something vulnerable about seeing a piece of art before it is ready – sometimes, before anyone knew it would work. GDC is where you learn about the could-haves, might-have-beens, the almost-weres. These glimpses of humanity at GDC can be a powerful antidote against games as products that are only meant to pump sales numbers. This much hasn’t changed. But leaving GDC, it’s hard to shake off a feeling of uncertainty about what lies ahead for an industry that has propped its dreams with unsustainable practices. And as GDC slowly evolves every year, the things I love about it have never felt more ephemeral.

The night before I left San Francisco, I walked through my hotel lobby one last time. As I entered the elevator, I saw a group of young developers all huddled around a laptop. Everyone was craning their necks to see the screen. “I’ll probably delete it later,” the creator said.

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