Fibonacci Reminder

Posted by Andrew Plotkin

https://blog.zarfhome.com/2026/03/gdc-gloom

"Haruspicy" in the sense that I'm going to examine the entrails and try to predict the future of GDC. Disclaimer: I cannot predict the future.

Also disclaimer: I don't have any inside info. I've chatted with a lot of people on various Slacks and Discords. And I was there, in San Francisco, last week. But I only saw a small slice of What Went On. This is an exercise in putting together a coherent picture from a lot of scraps. Maybe the exercise is more interesting than the results! You decide.

I'll admit up front that I'm on the pessimistic end of the spectrum. (That's the "gloom" part.) A lot of people are wondering if GDC is maybe in trouble. I think GDC is definitely in trouble, and the only question is how catastrophic things are. But again, I don't have any inside info.

Let's start with last year's show.

Last year

I attended GDC 2025. I wasn't an IGF juror last year (I did more than my stint), but I was able to scrounge a free pass, so that was no problem.

It seemed like a pretty normal GDC for the post-lockdown era. 30k attendees -- very crowded. The show floor had mostly switched from blockchain hype to AI hype, but you know there's always a new hype cycle.

(My first GDC was 2012 and I don't remember what the hype was. Must have been something. VR hype wasn't until 2016.)

The change-up

So 2025 wraps up, 2026 comes into view, and GDC unveils this enormous rebranding exercise. Now they're the "GDC Festival of Gaming". Simplified pass scheme, blah blah.

Everybody's first reaction is "What the hell does 'Festival of Gaming' mean?" My second reaction is "Wow, they must really be in trouble." You don't change your whole plan if the plan is working!

The scraps I hear from friends corroborate this view. Apparently the game-industry titans tightened their purses in 2025. (Endless layoffs, but they also cut conference spending.) That means smaller and fewer booths. I didn't notice this, because why would I look at the Google/Amazon/Epic/Unity booths? I only care about the IGF pavilion, alt.ctrl.gdc, and other wacky stuff.

Anyhow, smaller booths means less revenue. GDC (I mean Informa, the parent company) realizes that they're on a non-sustainable path. Something Must Change. Not for the sake of change, but because the plane is heading for a cornfield.

What the rebrand means isn't very obvious. They've got a lot of verbiage about "bringing the entire industry together". In practice this means everybody gets a full-week pass.

(In the old days, indies and niche interests got a "Summit" (Mon-Tue) pass; industry mainstreamers got a Wed-Fri pass to see the show floor. Only journalists and hardcore nerds stayed the whole week.) (And me, because I had a comped All-Access pass, thank you IGF.)

Sidebar: Personally, I think the intended message is "You like hanging out in Yerba Buena Park with your game dev homies? Now all of GDC is like that! All park all the time! Please buy a pass please buy a pass." Maybe that's just me.

Leading indicators

The other obvious change is that GDC brings in a bunch of non-profits and indie dev collectives to burnish up their appeal. That's where I come in, obviously -- comped passes for IFTF, so I can spend a week spreading the good word about Twine and Zork.

(Another admission: I only went because I got a free pass. I enjoy GDC and I enjoy San Francisco. Just, um, not enough to pay for it. Travel costs are bad enough.)

Then the show floor map comes out, and whoa, it's half the size of 2025. Guess that's why they're willing to give free floor space to a bunch of interactive fiction nerds! Classic freebie areas like the IGF are much more spacious than they used to be. Even so, the entire show floor fits in Moscone South, instead of sprawling across both North and South as it used to.

In the corporate area of the floor -- the part that funds GDC -- the only big booths are Facebook, MS/Xbox, and Tencent. Google is small. Other industry names like Sony and Epic are entirely missing.

It becomes clear that some of those industry heavyweights are running GDC-adjacent events. "No badge required!" Also no booth fees landing in GDC coffers.

As we approach March, the smell of desperation grows. GDC starts pushing ticket raffles and "buy one, get one half-price" deals. They make student passes and indie passes super-easy to get. Hotel prices fall from their usual nosebleed conference heights; they're clearly underbooked.

(Someone suggested that GDC released a bunch of reserved hotel blocks in January or February. That makes total sense to me. Hotels suddenly had lots of free space, started to undercut each other mercilessly, and prices dropped. Smart people cancelled and rebooked at the last minute and saved a bunch of money. I was not smart, but I've made a note for next year.)

At the show

March 9th: it begins.

(Yeah, I actually arrived early on the 7th and spent two days tootling around museums. See earlier post.)

Monday makes me think I was wrong all along. Talks and presentations are hoppin'. I went to a narrative tool talk that was packed solid! Trust me, narrative tools are not usually that popular. (Except at NarraScope, but that's a very different event.)

It takes me a while to figure out what's going on. Remember how everybody gets a Mon-Fri pass this year? They're still only running the expo hall from Wed-Fri. The result is that a whole lot of attendees showed up Monday and realized that there was nothing to do but some boring old lectures! I literally saw one guy prowling around Moscone asking the guards where the booths were.

On Wednesday the show floor opens, and the truth is dreadfully clear: the crowds are much thinner than last year. Everybody is calculating the same result from different angles. The lobbies of the usually-popular hotels are not mobbed like they usually are. The expo hall is mild at best. A security guard asks me, "Where is everybody?"

There are still plenty of people. 20000 people is a lot! Just... less.

You probably read some stuff about Yerba Buena Park being fenced off. It was only partially fenced off, support for the new food tents. (Did we need new food tents? I dunno.) But it didn't matter anyhow -- I never saw enough people out there to fill the park. Not like last year or the year before. There were enough people for crowds around the edges, and that's what we got.

Sidebar: So why did people stay away? Obvious reasons: devs are out of work and can't afford it; companies are skint and won't pay for travel; non-US people are reluctant to risk US travel; GDC is smaller so there's less reason to come.

Which of these is the "real" reason? All of them; I don't know the relative weights; guessing would be worthless. My gut feeling is that most people are making a simple economic calculation of "What can GDC do for me?" and the margin is down. My gut is not statistically reliable.

(Several of my non-US friends refused to travel here because of the current xenophobic regime. That doesn't tell me anything about the other ten thousand missing faces.)

Reactions

Like I said, I had a great time! I hung out with lots of people who I know from earlier GDCs and other game events. I hung out with lots of people who I never met before. Yeah, this was down to having a script to route around my social anxieties, rather than anything GDC did. But still.

Overall, my impression is that people were... happier than last year? With GDC as an event, I mean.

Some it was sheer defiance. Yes, the industry is screwed, let's just go make games. "Punk rock energy," as someone said. Let's go build new communities! Three scheduled events about game preservation, that was great. (Plus a Friday happy hour at the MADE.)

Some of it was the enthusiasm of youth. Someone told me, I don't have a solid source but I believe it, that 40% of the attendees were first-time GDCers. Lots of students, like I said. GDC is a lot of fun to crash into! New blood always helps.

The park was not crowded overall, but large groups formed. The thinky-games crowd was large and enthusiastic. I walked past a big group with a "student developers" sign. (See "new blood" above.) There was a roguelike meetup and a visual novel meetup that I couldn't make it to, but I'm sure they were successful.

Apparently the super-select "Luminaries" events were so undersold that they wound up letting in regular schmoes. Wish I'd known that.

I am told that publishers and developers were talking and making deals. The wheel has not stopped turning. Opinions are divided about whether things will actually get better next year, or whether we've just all accepted a defunct industry as normal. But I am very far removed from that wheel (I've never pitched a game or set up a publisher meeting at GDC) so I won't get into that.

Yes, there was a crap-ton of AI at GDC. Every commercial booth was AI hype. Half the talks were AI hype. Some people found that oppressive and/or depressing. I just walked past that stuff and went to the good talks. I'm not bragging, here, I'm just saying that there was good conference showing through the cracks.

And next year?

Now we get into the entrails.

The plain facts look bad. Booth spending was way down this year, and then attendance declined by a full third! Are Facebook and Xbox and Tencent going to bother getting large booths in 2027? Why should they? If the crowds keep shrinking, the reasons to attend will shrink as well. This could be the leading edge of a death spiral.

GDC's value proposition just doesn't look great any more. It used to be the One Place Everybody Got Together, but that's splintering. Unity and Unreal have their own developer events, where they collect the booth fees rather than paying them. As do Microsoft and Amazon and Facebook and so on.

It seems like, with the general economic contraction, everybody has run the numbers and decided that it's more cost-efficient to retreat within their own private event. Or, at best, rent an adjacent hotel and stay out of GDC's grasp.

On the flip side: GDC is determined to keep itself going. The first room I walked into on Monday morning had a slide up saying "GDC will return in 2027!" On Saturday, when they dropped the news that attendance had crashed, they also dropped the news that GDC 2027 was still on.

What will it look like? Well, they might not bother renting out the ball park again. I think that was a flop. But overall, I figure they'll try to repeat 2026 and hope that the crowds grow back.

Sidebar: Does it make sense for GDC to shrink in a sustainable way? I mean, if this were planned as a 15k-person conference, 20k people would be a huge success. I guess the question is: is there an island of stability, or is it death spiral all the way down? The GDC folks must have those spreadsheets cued up, but they're not letting on what they say.

Sidebar: One rumor -- I have no intel on this, it's pure speculation -- that GDC is locked into a multi-year contract with Moscone. In which case they have to keep running the event, full-scale, even if they're losing money every year. Scary! For them. No skin off my nose.

Sadly, GDC 2027 is probably going to dig even deeper into AI than 2026 did. The "AI crash" is nowhere in sight. Six months ago I thought it might be close. The tools all sucked; the VCs knew it; they were maybe starting to get cold feet. Well, the current generation of AI tools suck less. I'm not telling you they're good; I haven't used them myself; I'm just saying that hope is back on the menu and VC feets are toasty warm. If there's a crash coming, it's over the horizon -- definitely not as soon as March 2027.

(Unless the entire economy wipes out in whatever combination of oil shock, food crisis, pandemic part deux, or global trade lockup leaps out and bites us. That's way above my pay grade. At that point GDC will be the least of our worries, anyhow.)

Anyhow, if there's a GDC and I'm not starving in a ditch next year, I hope they give me another free pass. I'd be happy to go back. Just, um, not enough to pay for it.

Further reading

• Aftermath.site: GDC Was Defined By Anxiety About The Future Of The Games Industry And America
• Justin Bortnick: GDC 2026 Recap

(Justin is IFTF's president and the guy who arranged our entire GDC presence. Including my free pass this year. Thanks Justin!)

https://blog.zarfhome.com/2026/03/gdc-gloom

Posted by Andrew Plotkin

https://blog.zarfhome.com/2026/03/twine-zork-gdc

I went to GDC with IFTF, and I had a great time!

I'm not sure the conference had a great time. You may have seen that attendance was 30% lower than last year. However, I'll save the gloom-and-haruspicy for another post. All the people I talked to enjoyed themselves, and I talked to quite a few people.

As you know, IFTF had a table in the Commons area of the show floor. In fact we had three tables. Plus one Monday night at the ballpark opening event.

Two machines were running a collaborative exquisite-corpse Twine project. Everybody who came by was invited to sit down and add a passage. This was a hit -- we wound up with about 120 contributed passages.

The GDC Twine Adventure should be posted very soon. Watch this space.

On the flip side (literally), the Visible Zorker!

Our setup had Zork 1, Zork 2, and (as a special preview for GDC attendees) Zork 3. We mostly kept the screen on Zork 1 though.

The table next door had a bunch of 1980s computer magazines. They were kind enough to loan us an issue of Creative Computing (1982) with an Infocom ad.

Zork was less recognized than Twine. (Everybody's heard of Twine.) But the folks in the know got very excited about the Visible Zorker project. A couple of educators visibly bounced when they realized that they could use this in the classroom.

I shall hope this brings in more contributors to the Patreon!

On the personal side, I got to demo the Zorker to Tonda Ros. And to fanboy him a bit, which I'm sure he got plenty of that week, but I did my part. I also demoed to Tim Hutchings -- I really need to write up his "Old Morris Cave: A Continuous Use Campsite in Mammoth Cave National Park". (Spot the IF connection!)

I'm told that Steve Meretzky was around GDC but I did not run into him. Ah well. I'm pretty sure he's aware of the Zorker, but it would have been nice to chat about it.

So what else did you do at GDC?

I engaged with people socially!

Way more than I usually do. I'm chatty here, parasocially on the blog, but in real life I'm a stone introvert. (No surprise, I know.) But it turns out that "Are you familiar with Twine?" is a terrific icebreaker. Everybody's heard of Twine. Most people don't know that it's backed by an educational nonprofit association, though. We can talk about that! Yes, we would love donations, yes, it would be great if companies that rely on Twine helped support it. Yes, tell me about what you did with Twine, that sounds awesome.

Same thing with Zork. "Are you familiar with Zork?" (Yes, says Tonda Ros, a half-second before I read his name badge and realize who I'm pitching to.) Then we're talking about game education, or historic preservation, or TinyMUD, or wacky things that IF could do if it were doing something else. Or anything. Knot theory. (It came up.)

This wasn't just at the IFTF booth. I dropped by the Thinky Puzzle meetup in the park and had a long chat with several neat people. There were three game-history events on the GDC schedule -- a roundtable, a social meetup, and the annual "What's New in Game Preservation" panel. I missed that third one (had to help set up the table for Monday night) but I ran into Jason Scott in the hall and we caught up.

My time was mostly spoken for, but I went to a few talks. There was an interesting one by Owlcat Games about the narrative scripting tool they use for their "large, sprawling" RPGs. (I haven't played 'em but the design problems were familiar.) Don Daglow gave a great talk about his 50-year career in game dev -- he has seen some stuff in his time, and his time isn't over. Julian Cordero talked about how he turned his Quito childhood into Despelote. And there was a really neat presentation by the cultural research expert for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Did you know they looked up all the minerals of the game's magic stones to make sure they were findable in -- or trade-routable to -- the appropriate locations? I love that.

IGF awards! I wasn't at the ceremony but it's a good list. Perfect Tides: Station to Station is one that I definitely have to play. (NarraScope Showcase winner, btw.) Blippo+ has been heavily recommended to me and I must catch up. As for Titanium Court -- I played the demo. Match-three really isn't my thing, but I loved all the narrative foofaraw surrounding the match-three gameplay -- built on it -- so I may have to dig into the full game anyhow.

I was able to pay my compliments to William Rous on the show floor. Yes, I was rooting for Type Help to win Best Narrative. Ah well. Next year in Galley House, am I right?

And what else did you do in San Francisco?

I ate dinner(s) in Chinatown, of course.

I was able to get away from Moscone long enough to visit the Asian Art Museum; they have a terrific exhibit of modern Japanese ceramics. I truly love that stuff. If you do too, be sure to check out the permanent collection on the second floor.

I also poked my head into the Museum of Craft and Design, and took a turn around the Japanese Tea Garden and Botanical Gardens.

But my big discovery was the Letterform Archive. This is a tiny place up the street from Craft and Design. Just one gallery, really -- but a gallery drawn from an amazing collection of "lettering, typography, calligraphy, and graphic design".

The current exhibit is Piet Zwart, a Dutch designer ("typotekt", he described himself) who revolutionized typography starting in the 1920s.

He did telephone cable ads. That's what you're looking at. "N.K.F.": Nederlandse Kabelfabriek Delft.

Later he did other stuff. He wasn't interested in logos or brands. Consistency? Hah. All his layouts were different and they were all clearly his work.

And that's just one exhibit! Look at the previous exhibits page. Man, I would live in this place if I were a Left Coaster.

Get this: when I walked into the gallery, I heard "tap tap tap" noises coming from the back room. What? A video exhibit? Nope -- when I peered around the corner, I saw a classroom full of people with stone tablets. They were making letters with hammers and chisels. A stone-carving lettering workshop. Of course. How else will people learn why serifs exist?

So yeah. I don't know what the future of GDC looks like, but I hope I keep getting this excuse to visit San Francisco. It's such a great town to wander around it. Also terrible, because of the abyss of deprivation and human misery which you cannot look away from, right in parallel with the wealth and the art and the joy. Doesn't mean I want to stay home.

As I was getting off the BART, a Cute Young Thing turned and asked me, "Are you a guy who thinks about the Singularity?"

"No," I said, "I'm not really a fan of the Singularity." And we went our separate ways through the exit gates. I still have no idea what that question meant. Only in San Francisco, I guess.

https://blog.zarfhome.com/2026/03/twine-zork-gdc