game-developers-conference posts

The annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco has always been the first big game event of the industry, at least in terms of new game announcements. Today the organizers of GDC announced that last week's 2011 edition had "record" attendance numbers with 19,000 game industry officials.

While there were a number of cool lectures and panels at GDC 2011 much of the show's highlights actually took place outside San Francisco's Moscone Convention Center as game publishers showed off a ton of upcoming game titles to the press including Battlefield 3. Next year's GDC event will take place from March 5-9, 2012.

The Game Developers Conference is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year and as part of its celebration the conference will be holding some special post mortem panels. These panels will focus on some of the most influential games of all time. 11 such panels will be held during the event in San Fransisco on February 28-March 4.

The post mortem panels will include a look back at the development of a number of classic PC games. The list of games includes Prince of Persia (with Jordan Mechner), Doom (with John Romero), Bejeweled (with Jason Kapalka) Populus (with Peter Molyneux), Elite (with David Braben) and Manic Mansion (with Ron Gilbert).

The 2011 edition of the Game Developers Choice Awards has just announced the finalists for the award's various categories and as usual a number of PC games found their way to being nominated. The PC game with the most nominations was BioWare's RPG Mass Effect 2 which received five nods, including Game of the Year. The indie game hit Minecraft got three nominations in the Innovation, Best Debut Game and Best Downoadable game categories.

Call of Duty Black Ops also got a Game of the Year nomination as did Assassin's Creed Brotherhood (due out for the PC later this year). StarCraft II also got a nod for Best Technology. You can check out the entire list of nominees at Gamasutra's web site. The winner's will be announced on March 2 during the Game Developers Conference.

It may no longer be the only indie game competition in town, or even the one that has the biggest cash prize, but the annual Independent Games Festival is still the one that all the indie game developers want to win. The 13th annual IGF will be held as part of the Game Developers Conference in San Fransisco in early March and this week the IGF revealed all of the games that have been submitted to this year's event.

Over 400 games were submitted which is a new record. As usual it was a mix of previously released titles (such as Minecraft) and games that have yet to be released to the public such as Bastion, Skulls of the Shogun and Spy Party. The finalists for the IGF's various awards will be named in January.

Ah, Wing Commander. It's a real shame that EA doesn't seem interested at all in revisiting a truly great PC game franchise. Can you imagine what can be done with today's graphics?

• It looks like the benchmark software 3DMark 11 has been delayed until the fourth quarter of 2011.
• There's another big hint that zombies will be in Call of Duty: Black Ops.
• That brower-based MMO The Bible Online has now gone live.
• There's a bug patch for Borderlands that's now available on Steam.
• The Game Developers Conference is now taking submissions for panels for the 2011 event.

The oldest competition for independent game development has now announced the call for submissions for the 2011 edition. The Independent Games Festival web site is now looking for indie game companies to submit their titles for the 13th annual competition. Games will be competing for nearly $50,000 in total cash prizes including the 20,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize.

Games for the main festival will be accepted until October 18 and the Student category will take submissions until November 1. Finalists for both will be announced in January and the winners will be revealed on March 2 during the 2011 Games Developers Conference in San Fransisco. This year the IGF will be expanding what it's calling its Nuovo Award catagory for short experimental "art games" from five to eight finalists.

Even with the battered economy, it looks like the just completed Game Developers Conference can still bring in large crowds. Today the organizers announced that GDC 2010 had 18,250 official attendees. This is the largest ever for the show, breaking 2009's record of 17,000 attendees.

As we reported last week the 2011 edition of GDC will be held once again in San Fransisco but at an earlier point in the year, from February 28-March 4. If you didn't get a chance to go, don't fret. In about two weeks. selected video from many of GDC's various lectures will be available for free at the GDC Vault web site.

The 2010 edition of the Game Developers Conference has just started in San Fransisco but the dates for the 2011 event have apparently already been set. Our sister site Joystiq reports that GDC 2011 will be held from February 28-March 4. As usual, the show will be held in and around the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco.

This year's event began today, a Tuesday, and will end on a Saturday instead of its normal Monday-Friday time period due to previous scheduling conflicts with the Moscone Center. There will be no such conflicts in 2011 as GDC will return to its usual Monday-Friday time period.

If you thought that the 2010 edition of the Game Developers Conference would be a place for big game announcements, think again. This year the annual event, to be held from March 9-13 in San Fransisco, will truly emphasize the people that make the games rather than splashy game reveals.

Gamesindustry.biz (free to read with registration) chatted with GDC head Meggan Scavio who stated this year's event is " . . . not about making news, it's not about announcing things – it's about making better games." In terms of big game announcements, Scavio stated that E3 is the best venue for such things.

Of course some game publishers and companies may decide to go ahead and reveal some big news this year at GDC anyway. Last year, the big reveal from the show was OnLive, the streaming game service that is now in closed beta. Ubisoft also announced their upcoming RTS game R.U.S.E. at the show last year. Several years ago, Will Wright used a GDC lecture to sneak in the first reveal of Spore. It's very possible that something like that will happen for GDC 2010.

Info about Deus Ex 3 has mostly been kept under lock and key for the most part since it was first announced a couple of years ago. Now it looks like some of the veil behind the upcoming cyberpunk-themed RPG-action game is about to be lifted, courtesy of the Game Developers Conference.

A newly revealed listing on the GDC 2010 web site shows that a lecture on the game will be given on March 11 during the conference. The lecture will be handed by Eidos Montreal's art director Jonathan Jacques-Belletete. He will be talking about "the creative underpinnings behind the unique blend of art style that combines the past, present and future in the next evolution of the Deus Ex franchise." In other words, expect lots of new info about the game to get presented to the GDC attendees. Eidos's new publisher Square Enix has not yet announced a definitive release date for the game.