The Game Developers Conference, taking place in San Francisco this week, is ostensibly on the bleeding edge of game development — a nexus point where luminaries congregate to exchange trade secrets in preparation for what’s next. This is only partially true. Absolutely, many fly out to one of the most expensive cities in the world to learn; they wouldn’t pay the piper otherwise. But longtime attendees also make the trek for a feeling of familiarity, to see old friends and reify comfortable connections despite swimming against an industry current of endless change. This year, GDC has cracked that illusion.
Moscone, the largest convention center in the city, houses much of GDC. But the conference — like many others — spills out into numerous nearby venues and locales, of which the nearby Yerba Buena Gardens make the most intuitive sense. The Gardens might as well be part of the Moscone Center, given their proximity, and if the weather’s nice, the manicured lawn and cool air serve as a needed reprieve from stuffy, artificially lit halls. Whether for breakfast, lunch, or to network into all hours of the evening, developers have treated the Gardens as a flashpoint for well over a decade. This year, throughout large portions of the day, there are some new additions: tents, benches, and a fence.
Independent of one another, these things are not a huge problem. The tents allow local vendors to serve food, the benches provide seating, and the fences protect the tents after hours. Together, however, they occupy a significant portion of what used to be an area in which developers rolled out blankets, picnicked, and hosted impromptu mini-conferences that, crucially, did not cost money to attend. As of Sunday this week, before GDC even officially began, developers — both in attendance and not — were incensed.
"This year it seems that GDC has decided to violate that long held precedent and take the expo outside."
"Since time immemorial the Yerba Buena Gardens across from the Moscone Center have been a neutral ground for folks at the show to go hang out without being on the expo grounds,” game developer and visual designer Max Krieger wrote on Bluesky, expounding on a sentiment of general disillusionment shared by many developers. “This means off the record convos, introducing people to other people, and general chillin’ — outside the expo. This year it seems that GDC has decided to violate that long held precedent and take the expo outside."
Initially, there was confusion as to what the fences, benches, and tents meant, with many assuming the worst — that the Yerba Buena Gardens had been blocked off for the five-day-long duration of the conference, open only to those with the means to shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars for a badge. In actuality, the space remains open to all, within limits.
“The park is fully open to the public, badge or no badge, from 11 am until 6 pm every day,” a GDC rep told Aftermath. “From 11 am to 2 pm, a variety of food vendors are selling lunch. Between 2-3 pm, the fences go back up, however there is an entrance/exit through the gates so that the general public can hang out on the grassy area up until 6 pm. From 6 pm until 11 am, the fences are closed fully to protect the equipment of the food vendors. The food is on sale to anyone at all.”
But short of a couple signs, this was poorly communicated, and even now that there’s a broader awareness of the rules, many have opted to set up shop around the space rather than within it.
"The developers that you'd normally see on blankets or circulating in the area, they've all kind of pushed themselves into the crescent between the [nearby] Metreon [theater] and the little tree block,” Tiffany Otto, a business consultant who works in games, told Aftermath. “I'm not seeing as much mixing, and I think that's a real shame because our intersectionality is what makes our industry great and gives us that je ne sais quoi that lets us succeed in places where maybe traditional tech can't. … It [used to be] the kind of place where you could run into somebody from a big studio like Sony or Nintendo who's meeting up with other people they know."
"This place really felt like game dev paradise,” sound designer, composer, and singer Katelyn Isaacson told Aftermath. “It's really sunny all the time. This whole conference is essentially a bubble of friends and food and whatever for a week, and [Yerba Buena Gardens] felt like a really big part of that. ... People would just sort of hang out and lie down in different groups, and you could walk around."
To an outside observer, the furor might seem unreasonable. After all, at the end of the day, all we’re really talking about is a patch of grass. But GDC, as a conference and organization, has taken on a new shape in recent years, the culmination of which is 2026’s “Festival Of Gaming” rebrand — a seeming attempt at courting wider audiences with both cheaper and more expensive badge options, as well as a broader range of activities and player-friendly branding. However, one could also see this — and ensuing encroachment into spaces like Yerba Buena — as a reaction to developers’ recognition that GDC had grown impractically expensive, and that its real value lay outside the paywall-surrounded convention hall.
"This place really felt like game dev paradise.”
“It seems to be that what they’re trying to do is give people more value for the money—having places to eat and music—but I really think that the optics of it were extremely bad,” Aysha Farah, who was lead writer on Life Is Strange: Double Exposure before being laid off, told Aftermath. “This is literally the space where, if you can’t afford a pass, you go. … It feels exclusionary, even if they’re trying for it not to be.”
"I love that they're focusing on local restaurants, and I'm aware of some of the brands of the restaurants they brought in to pop up,” said Otto. “The price of those restaurants is definitely what I would say is expense account quality. I think there's a mismatch, because a lot of the people I see frolicking around Yerba are not at that price point in the current economy. ... They're on student badges. They have, like, $7 a day, and you look at the products being served at the pop up: They're between $20 and $30 a piece, which is very San Francisco."
The whole thing, Otto believes, sends the wrong message, even if it's being done with the best of intentions.
"I also think it's a bit of a flaw to have, I'm assuming, a permit for the space for the full time of GDC, but locking it off with gates [in the evening] and having security personnel remove people from the picnic tables," she said. "It feels very, I don't want to say gentrifying, but it feels like closing off a public space."
Yerba Buena, in particular, has long been a staging ground for guerilla counterprogramming efforts like Lost Levels, a radical “unconference” where anyone can give a brief talk if they so choose. This year, GDC also has musicians playing on a stage near the picnic tables, which can sometimes make conversation difficult.
"It feels like it misses the mark,” Starr Victoria Power, a composer who’s contributed to games like Calico and Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night, told Aftermath. “Obviously as a musician I love music, and I think these bands are really talented, but some of them are actually quite loud. So it's difficult to talk to people and hear each other and have conversations and catch up, and that's the main thing I come to Yerba Buena specifically to do."
But the video game industry is not what it was when many of these traditions first arose, and that, too, is part of the problem. In the past few years alone, tens of thousands of developers have been callously laid off by companies chasing impossible growth or trying to patch sinking ships. The future is less certain than it’s ever been, especially as what previously could have been regarded as a coherent industry fragments to serve triple-A-obsessed old heads, indie connoisseurs, League of Legends lifers, new generations weaned on Roblox, and countless additional groups — all while competing with TikTok just as much if not more so than other types of video game.
"There’s just been so much change in the industry, Saudi Arabia [and so on]—it’s not making anyone happy."
Where GDC once felt like an annual return home even with all the baggage that entails, it’s grown increasingly unrecognizable, like an old haunt paved over. For some, Yerba Buena represents the last straw.
“There was also so much skepticism around the rebrand, and they were like ‘Don’t worry, nothing’s gonna change,’ and then surprise, they did [fence off the gardens],” said Farah. “I think that’s what made everybody so mad, even if it’s not as bad as they were expecting. There’s just been so much change in the industry, Saudi Arabia [and so on]—it’s not making anyone happy.”
"I've been [to GDC] three years now, and I've seen a marked inflection of change,” Kory Byrns, a hobbyist game developer, told Aftermath. “The first year I came, that was two years ago, I feel like was the residual [of an older iteration of GDC], a more consistent experience. Then the following year, in the wake of mass layoffs, you saw the expedition shrink, you saw a pall cast over the energy to some extent. This year, it feels almost like a little bit of flailing, like E3 [rebranding] to 'E For All.' They're looking for some way to rebrand in, like, panic mode."
But even beyond that, there’s also the elephant both in and outside the convention center: The world — and especially the United States — is changing rapidly, with a contingent of international developers opting to avoid GDC entirely this year out of concern over inexplicable detainment, militant ICE agents, or worse. When GDC 2026 attendees aren’t discussing games, they’re on their phones, poking at the situation in and around Iran like an open sore.
"I think [GDC] is a place of comfort for people, even with the challenges and all these other things,” Power said. “I think it's still nice to have a sense of familiarity in a world that's changing so rapidly."
"I'm surprised at how many international attendees are still here,” said Byrns. “I wasn't 100 percent sure whether or not I was going to come this year and one of the main factors in the 'probably not' column was how diminished it would feel here without that international presence—and not just international people, but also the trans community and anyone who doesn't feel comfortable traveling or may not have valid documents."
"We're going to run out [of frictionless spaces]."
GDC will never be the same, nor will the circumstances surrounding it. That’s always been true, to an extent, given how the passage of time works. But now it’s impossible to ignore.
"It's a real shame to lose what I would call an entry level thing, the same as we have a lack of seniors in the industry because we don't pipe in juniors and train them up,” said Otto. “Yerba Buena, in my opinion, is the most frictionless part of GDC. GDC is by definition a high friction environment, and people sponsoring or funding events, parties, and activations want high friction. They want VIPs. But in the same way on a PC you need a heat sink to sink the heat, you need a people sink, or you're going to have people trying to get into places that they're not going to be a good match for, or feeling disenfranchised. … We're going to run out [of frictionless spaces]. We're not going to have people that are well networked and well connected, intersectional and integrated in a way that allows us to create success in five years."
"Does Claude [AI] know a guy [who would be good for a job]?” she added. “He thinks he does, but he doesn't."
Recommended
Luke Plunkett
