The Brief

The Game Developers Conference opened its 40th edition in San Francisco on Monday under a new name — GDC Festival of Gaming — with overhauled pricing, a replacement keynote from Blizzard veteran Rob Pardo after Hideo Kojima’s unexplained withdrawal, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 leading the Game Developers Choice Awards with eight nominations. The French-developed RPG from a 30-person studio has already surpassed Elden Ring’s all-time Game of the Year record with 436 wins.

The Report

The Game Developers Conference opened at San Francisco’s Moscone Center on Monday under its first rebrand since 1999, marking its 40th edition as the GDC Festival of Gaming. The five-day event runs through March 13 with more than 700 sessions and 300 exhibitors.

The restructured event replaces GDC’s legacy tiered badge system with a simplified Festival Pass at $649 — 45 percent cheaper than the previous All-Access pass — alongside discounted rates for students and indie developers starting at $549. The former Expo Floor has been redesigned as a Festival Hall with five themed neighbourhoods covering game development, future tech, indie and education, international, and monetisation. New session formats include fireside chats, forums, and a live stage for demos and interviews.

The keynote slot underwent its own unplanned reinvention. Hideo Kojima was announced in December as the first GDC keynote speaker in five years, with a talk titled “Restarting from Zero: A Message to Creators Considering Independence.” Kojima Productions withdrew him on February 6 without explanation, offering “deepest apologies” while confirming other team members would still present. Rob Pardo, former Blizzard chief creative officer and founder of Bonfire Studios, was named as replacement on March 3. His keynote, “An Odyssey in Building Games That Last,” shifts the focus from independent studio-building to the design principles behind long-running titles.

The 26th annual Game Developers Choice Awards ceremony takes place Thursday, with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 dominating nominations. The turn-based RPG from Montpellier-based Sandfall Interactive — a studio of roughly 30 developers founded by former Ubisoft employees in 2020 — earned eight nominations across all nine categories, including Game of the Year. Ghost of Yōtei follows with five nominations. The game has already accumulated 436 Game of the Year wins across publications and award ceremonies, surpassing Elden Ring’s record of approximately 430. Industry veteran Rich Vogel called it “a really good game” while adding that he found it “hard to accept that Expedition 33 is a better game than Elden Ring.”

The conference opens against persistent industry turbulence. A GDC state-of-the-industry survey found 28 percent of respondents had been laid off in the past two years, rising to 33 percent among US-based developers. Two-thirds of respondents at AAA studios reported their companies had conducted layoffs. International attendance faces additional headwinds, with some visitors citing concerns about the political climate in the United States. The Independent Games Festival awards, led by Baby Steps with five nominations from nearly 800 entries, are scheduled for Wednesday evening.

The Angle

There is something structurally telling about a conference that rebrands itself as a festival in a year when a third of its domestic attendees have been recently laid off. GDC’s pricing overhaul is real — a 45 percent reduction is not cosmetic — but the shift from “conference” to “festival” is a vocabulary choice that orients toward celebration at a moment when the industry’s dominant experience is contraction. The question is whether the rebranding reflects where the industry is headed or where GDC’s organisers would prefer it to be heading.

The more interesting signal is buried in the awards slate. Sandfall Interactive is 30 people in Montpellier who left Ubisoft during the pandemic, built a turn-based RPG in a genre the major studios had decided was commercially obsolete, and produced the most decorated game in the history of the medium. The record they broke belonged to FromSoftware’s Elden Ring — a title backed by one of the largest publishers in the world and co-authored by a bestselling fantasy novelist. The standard reading is an underdog story. The structural reading is a capability story: the tools available to a small team in 2025 made it possible to compete with — and outperform — the full weight of industrialised game development. That gap between what a small team can do and what a large studio can do has been narrowing for a decade. Expedition 33 is the point where it closed.

Kojima’s withdrawal and Pardo’s substitution tell a quieter version of the same story. The planned keynote was about going independent — Kojima’s decade-long arc from Konami employee to autonomous creator. The replacement keynote is about building things that last. Both are reasonable subjects. But in a room where 28 percent of the audience has been pushed out of the structures they used to work in, the difference between the two is the difference between a map and a consolation.