Scandals, snake oil, and optimism: GDC is back | This Week in Business
Brendan Sinclair
Managing Editor
Friday 25th March 2022
This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check back every Friday for a new entry.
It's GDC week, and for the first time in a few years, we had a somewhat normal show where much of the industry's attention focused on the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
It's been a while. How long? Well, the last normal GDC -- the 2019 show -- was the big coming out party for Google Stadia, which has come and (mostly) gone since then. It's actually been over a year since Google shut down its Stadia first-party studios.
Even if Stadia is no longer among the "next big thing" topics, much of this GDC week surely felt familiar to those either attending in person or following the festivities on social media. There was plenty of news about start-ups and acquisitions, recruitment pitches galore, people vociferously hating on or defending San Francisco, group selfies of smiling friends at the Yerba Buena Gardens, group selfies of existential dread from people at Denny's, and everything that has come to be synonymous with GDC.
There were, of course, other familiar things.
This is not the first GDC to arrive alongside a public reckoning for some high-profile indies.
At 2018's GDC, the scandal was about 2064: Read Only Memories developer MidBoss and accusations of sexual harassment, inappropriate behavior, and mistreatment of marginalized employees by studio CEO Matt Conn. It was shocking for some, a long-known whisper network factoid for others, and a reminder that things like working on a game full of queer representation and
Read more on gamesindustry.biz
