think-services posts

While game industry members prepare for the mothership Game Developers Conference in San Fransisco next month, the show's organizers Think Services are already thinking ahead for the next event. Today they announced that GDC Austin, which has always concentrated on discussions of online gaming, has now been officially renamed GDC Online.

The event will still be held in Austin, Texas with the new version to be held on October 5-8. The newly renamed GDC Online will concentrate even more on online gaming, including MMO titles, social gaming and more. Submissions for the event will begin later this spring.

If you are a game developer the best place to get a job is still in the state of California. Despite comments by Electronic Arts' CEO that it's getting too expensive to run a game development business in that part of the US, a new census of game developers from Think Services shows that 46 percent of them (20,815) in the US work in California. Washington is next with over 4,500 developers and Texas is third with over 2,600 developers.

Overall there was a slight rise in the US of people working in the game industry with 44,806 people registered in the census compared to 44,400 in 2008. However, Canada has had an explosion of game employees from 9,500 in 2008 to 12,480 game developers this year.

As expected, the Game Developers Conference has a slight downturn in the number of attendees for the annual gathering of game industry professionals. According to GDC's parent company Think Services, the 2009 edition had over 17,000 people show up. That's down from an estimated 18,000 attendees from 2008.

Some might blame the economy for the small drop in attendance but it's also possible that the smaller amount was due to GDC's decision to make the event invite only for journalists who attended the event. The dates for the 2010 GDC have already been announced. It will be held on Tuesday, March 9 to Saturday, March 13 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.