Happening every March during the final week of the month, thousands of gaming fans, publishers, and most importantly game developers converge on the city of San Francisco for a celebration/conference known as the Game Developers Conference. Set to begin on March 19th, the Game Developers Conference (GDC) serves as a place where fans and makers of games can gather to explore new ideas, attend conferences around every facet of the industry, and of course to debut new games for the first time.
With announcements last year like a wireless Wi-Fi enabled VR headset from Qualcomm, the first price cut for the insanely popular Oculus Rift and most importantly the reveal of NVIDIA’s 1080Ti graphics card. This year we’re not entirely sure what will be going down during GDC, but since Virtual Reality is having less and less of a push we can expect to see less of that and more of the popular Augmented Reality which has been used in games like Pokemon Go.
This year’s conference which is taking place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco will be seeing major developers joining the lineup to host talks or announce new products to the masses. Companies like Microsoft, Epic Games, Sony, and Ubisoft will all be in attendance and be hosting their own talks surrounding their upcoming products.
GDC 2018 Details:
UBM/GDC
Name: Game Developers Conference 2018 (GDC 2018)
Dates: March 19 – March 23, 2018
Location: Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA
Buy Tickets: GDC Registration
Tickets for the 2018 GDC can still be purchased in advance online through the official GDC Registration or can be purchased on site if needed. Below are all the prices for passes to the event according to the official website:
UBM/GDC
Expo passes only allow you access to the main show floor whereas the other packages allow you access to a variety of different keynotes and talks given by various presenters.
GDC 2018 Panels:
This year’s Game Developers Conference will be jam-packed full of different and diverse panels from a variety of presenters. Developers like Microsoft, Sony, Insomniac Games, Ubisoft, and Epic Games will be in attendance to show off their latest. Sony has already announced they will be hosting panels on “Player Engagement in VR Cinematics” and will be sponsoring even more; while also demoing new games like Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom & insanely popular Monster Hunter World.
Microsoft has also announced their plans for the conference including a panel entitled “ID@XBOX: The Most Powerful Game Developer Community Ever” and will have booths dedicated solely to their Azure and PlayHub initiatives. Including their talk which was listed above, Microsoft will also be sponsoring/hosting over ten different talks to get involved with at the conference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOwb0inoAWc
Also making their way to the conference are Epic Games who will be opening up the conference with their “State of Unreal” panel which will talk about the state of the Unreal Engine 4 and where it will be going over the next year. The company has also unveiled plans for VR panels which has gotten people online ravenous to know what their plans might be….. Fortnite in VR anybody?
Ending out GDC 2018 will be the annual Game Developers Choice Awards which hand out awards to the biggest and best games from over the past year. As usual, leading the charge with nominations is the critically and commercially acclaimed The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild while other equally critically acclaimed games like PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS & Super Mario Odyssey earning nominations as well. The Game Developers Choice Awards have been streamed each year live on the official GDC Twitch channel which will be embedded below!
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