GDC 2023 was not a very happy gathering (Picture: Game Developers Conference)
The post-mortem on this year’s Game Developers Conference suggests publishers are going to avoid risks and double-down on established IP.
It was the Game Developers Conference (GDC) last week in San Francisco, which isn’t usually a big event in terms of public announcements but, especially given the collapse of E3, it is a useful opportunity for developers to meet each other and for publishers to make business deals.
The problem with this year’s event, as you might guess, is the precarious state of the games industry at the moment, with publishers continuing their now familiar complaints about a lack of growth and the high cost of making modern triple-A games.
What’s also become commonplace is their lack of constructive solutions to these problems, with the predictable answer at GDC being to rely more on established franchises and to avoid anything that seems even slightly risky.
The worse thing is that most people seem perfectly aware that this is going to be self-defeating, while also ignoring the underlying problem, but it looks like they’re going to do it anyway.
‘The video-game industry has not grown to accommodate budgets,’ Epic Games vice president Saxs Persson told Bloomberg. ‘You’re going to get things that people perceive as being safe. Nobody wants to play safe. Nobody says, ‘This is a good, predictable game.’’
‘It’s harder to take risks,’ admitted Tencent vice president Martin Sibille, who’s also worked at EA for 15 years.
It’s all depressingly predictable, including the fact that it’s only indie companies which are offering any respite from endless sequels and spin-offs.
‘Our strategy is to weather what’s going on right now,’ said Devolver Digital’s Nigel Lowrie. ‘The risks are still there, but they’re not so high that it’s cataclysmic.’
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The worry is that not only are publishers not addressing the central issue, of the increased cost of making big budget games, but that there are rumours that both Sony and Microsoft have next generation consoles only a few years away.
At that point the amount of time and money needed to make a high-end game will increase even further, as it does every generation, and the situation will be made even worse.
Assuming, that is, that companies are even trying to make anything other than live service games by that point…
GDC is very different to E3 but it’s all there is now (Picture: Game Developers Conference)
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