Report from GDC 2018

Once again I attended the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco. This year's conference seemed to have a lot more energy than last. I also found a number of new technologies to be very interesting. While Unity didn't have a large presence, Unreal did. For those that don't know, both are makers of video game engines used by many developers around the world. In fact, if I had to give an award for the best booth at the show, it would be the Unreal booth. They actually had 2 booths and the one showcasing a number of games written in Unreal is my favorite of the show. This is significant because my company had a large booth but I liked Unreal's more.

Another booth, other than my own, that I enjoyed stopping at was from Amazon. They seem to have some pretty interesting technology that others can use to help create games. I stopped and talked with them for a bit and am impressed. Of course, I think my ideas are light years ahead of theirs but I might be a bit biased.

Virtual Reality continued to have growing representation and I am interested to see how that part of the market evolves. Right now I think we have some great technology with high-end hardware from Oculus, mid-market technology from PlayStation, and ubiquitous entry-level hardware with the smartphone manufacturers coupled with Google hardware . All we need is great content. Some new games have recently been released and I look forward to the E3 announcements this summer.

It pleased me greatly to see that this year's GDC seemed much better than some of the more recent ones. It gives me hope that the industry is healthy and picking up momentum again. Perhaps video games are just the distraction we all need to keep our mind off politics. I know it helps me.

Report from GDC 2017

Once again I attended the Game Developer's Conference (GDC) in San Francisco this year. I have managed to attend every year since 2013 but never write about it. The conference is really for companies that make technology for creating and playing video games. It is also a great place to go if you want to get a job in the industry as companies look to hire at the event.

I had a meeting in San Francisco on Wednesday and so I spent the morning at the Expo before heading to my late-afternoon appointment. I wish I could report that I saw a number of exciting and new technologies. Unfortunately I cannot. There seemed to be a lot relating to virtual reality but that has been the case for the past several years and so it all seemed a bit old. The most interesting technology seemed to come from students creating new ways of controlling games. They all looked very much like early prototypes but everyone seemed like they had a lot of fun creating them.

This year's show seemed smaller than usual and I didn't notice a large number of companies looking to hire people. I'm not sure if GDC represents the current state of the industry. Perhaps we need to wait until E3 and see if that is more exciting. I sure hope so.

Game Developers Conference 2013

It has been a few years since I have been able to attend the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. That is a travesty considering I work for a video game company. I joined my current company just a few days after GDC and so I didn't attend that year. The next year, I was busy implementing a new system and couldn't break away for an afternoon to attend. Last year I was set to attend, but had to babysit a sick database machine that kept overheating (adding a 1-U space between a networking switch and one of the database servers solved that problem).

I decided that this year I would make every effort to attend GDC simply to see the state of the industry. Monday and Tuesday were filled with class sessions and I only had an Expo pass. Wednesday was busy with yet another product rollout. Thursday looked like it was going to be the day and so I planned accordingly. I went to the office and made sure there were no issues to fix. I waited for my team to show up and nothing seemed out of the ordinary, so I headed to downtown San Francisco. Things were looking good as I headed to the show.

I enjoyed the show and it was good to see what other companies are doing. The most enlightening section was where gaming companies are looking to hire. Everyone is having trouble finding the right talent. There were a number of people looking for jobs but the majority of them seemed to be students and companies want people with experience. I continued through the rest of the conference but didn't see anything groundbreaking. Just as I finished with the last booth, I got a call from our network operations center and there was a problem I needed to address. I jumped on a BART train back to my office and then spent most of last night fixing some configuration issues related to our recent product rollout. I was able to get everything working correctly and am now at the airport ready to board my flight back to Salt Lake City. It was hectic but at least I was able to attend the show this year.