GDC 2024
What this year’s GDC says about the present and future of videogame development
GDC will have wrapped up by the time you read this, such is the nature of print publishing. But this annual gathering of videogame developers remains a useful barometer of more evergreen concerns: what’s on the mind of developers today, and where the industry might be heading tomorrow. Rarely has the gap between the two been wider than it appeared this year.
No moment encapsulates that better, perhaps, than the ‘GDScream’: a protestcum-group-therapy session held in the Yerba Buena Gardens outside the official venue and organised by former Epic Games employees Scott Jon Siegel and Caryl Shaw. “The game industry is falling apart around us, and we’re all flocking to San Francisco for a week to pretend like this is fine,” read the event’s homepage. “Let’s take a minute where we all stop pretending, and express just how it feels to be a game developer in 2024. Join us for a collective moment of catharsis, camaraderie, and caterwauling.”
Dozens of show attendees – among them developers who had lost their jobs in the recent waves of industry layoffs, and others feeling the bitter impact of their colleagues being cast aside – gathered to bellow their collective frustrations into the California sunshine. Speaking to PC Gamer, Siegel cited as motivation not only issues within the industry itself but also the rise of harassment and discrimination towards the game development community from so-called ‘anti-woke’ groups.
Meanwhile, inside the venue, Shaw and Siegel’s former employer attempted to outline its vision of the future. Epic’s State Of Unreal presentation kicked off with a look at Marvel 1943: Rise Of Hydra, the forthcoming game from Skydance New Media, headed by former Uncharted creative director Amy Hennig (who, having worked on more than her fair share of cancelled titles, is no stranger to industry instability). The trailer doubled as a showcase for Unreal Engine 5.4, with Hennig highlighting details such as volumetric smoke that can cast shadows on itself, along with dynamic creasing in its heroes’ outfits, courtesy of machine learning. The star, however, was Epic’s MetaHumans tech, which provides the game with some startlingly realistic faces for Captain America and Black Panther.
Elsewhere, the sense of frustration at the present state of the industry wasn’t limited to the event’s exterior. At the Game Developers Choice Awards, Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke condemned the corporate greed “which has been fucking this thing up for so long”, in an off-the-cuff acceptance speech for the Best Narrative award. “I keep on seeing the same, same mistakes over and over and over, and it’s always th
