The annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco is getting a new name and a new direction for 2026. Organizers are now calling the conference GDC Festival of Gaming, and while it’s still designed as a place for industry professionals to gather, make deals, and learn from their peers, the show is adapting to face current challenges facing the people who make games.
One of the bigger changes? The cost of attending GDC itself will be cheaper for many attendees.
GDC Festival of Gaming 2026 will take place March 9-13, 2026 in and around San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Next year’s show will be “designed for networking,” organizers say, and feature an expo hall divided into five “neighborhoods” focused on a specific area of interest: game development, future tech, indie and education, international, and monetization and player engagement.
What’s not changing are the gaming luminaries who come to GDC to provide insight into the creation of classic video games, and the technical talks where attendees can learn from their fellow developers.
Mark DeLoura, GDC’s executive director of innovation and growth, says that the show’s evolution is coming “in a time of great change,” and that the Festival of Gaming approach reflects that.
“I’ve been involved with GDC since 1997 in various ways as an attendee, as an advisory board member, as somebody buying booth space for Sony back in the day,” DeLoura tells Polygon. “I think that the conference hasn’t really evolved a lot over the years. Of course, the content’s changed dramatically, but as far as the show itself, it’s still a bunch of talks and an expo floor. So it was due.”
“People get information online and they might go to conferences for different reasons,” he adds. GDC Festival of Gaming will directly address that by focusing on bringing attendees together, both at the ground level where nuts-and-bolts game creation happens, and at the publishing, executive, financial-deal-making level.
So, yes, if you’re a studio head or a person with money, the folks running GDC want you to come, mingle, and learn. And they’re trying to make that easier to happen.
“One of the big pieces of feedback I got from the studio heads I talked to was: I go from hotel room, somebody’s bedroom to over here in St. Regis, to one at the Intercontinental, so I’m running around the city and I’m going into people’s hotel rooms, which is kind of creepy. You guys could just give me a space,” DeLoura says. “That seems like an easy one. So we’re trying to solve these sorts of things. The important part is that we’re talking to people and figuring out Why do you come? Why have you come? How can we help you make this a more valuable experience? We’re trying really hard to do that.”
But for the GDC attendees who aren’t studio heads or C-suite execs, who still have to hoof it to pricey San Francisco, DeLoura says the show is trying to cater to them too. GDC organizers have simplified the number of ways to attend or watch the conference, while also cutting the cost of attending in person.
Here’s the new pass structure, which includes a less-expensive new Festival Pass:
- Festival Pass ($649) — Full week access to world-class sessions, Festival Hall, networking programs, and nightly celebrations – at a price 45% lower than 2025’s All-Access.
- Game Changer Pass ($1,499) — Everything in our Festival Pass, plus premium seating and lounges, fast-track entry to keynotes/concerts/awards, access to the Luminaries Speaker Series, eligibility for GamePlan, and GDC Vault access.
- Digital Pass ($799) — Online-only networking during the event and on-demand GDC Vault access after.
- Application-based options – Support for early stage indies, start-ups, and academia so more of the ecosystem can be part of the week.
For budding game developers or indies trying to crack the game industry, don’t expect the show to move out of San Francisco for the foreseeable future.
“San Francisco is the center for game development in the U.S.,” DeLoura says. “From that perspective, having [GDC] in San Francisco has always made a ton of sense. It’s been in Moscone for a while. Makes a ton of sense. But then you look at the cost and you’re like, Wow, that doesn’t make a ton of sense. So it’s a balancing act. We’re doing the things that we can do. One of those is dramatically reducing the price of the conference this year. Of course, people have got to pay for flights and hotels, and San Francisco’s not cheap. We’re going to do what we can on the front to try to make it more acceptable for people to come.”
And while 2026 will be a test for the Festival of Gaming approach to GDC, DeLoura says that more experimentation is planned for the show as organizers hope to cater to what attendees actually want from it. That includes bringing back big keynotes.
“We’re looking at keynotes,” DeLoura says. “[GamesBeat’s] Dean Takahashi does fireside chats and they’re always great. We should have more fireside chats. We’re talking about debates. We haven’t really quite figured out what the topics are for debates, but we should have debates. We’re all here, we should be able to have a discussion about things.”
“In terms of the structure of talks, that’s what we’re looking at, mixing it up, [adding] more variety. GDC is really the place we want people to come to be able to talk about what’s going on right now. AI is a thing that we’re always talking about. We did a lot of Web3 crypto stuff, and I think that’s sort of tailed off a bit over the years. We talk about the overlapping, cross-discipline, multidisciplinary stuff, which we’ve never done before,” DeLoura explains. “We’ve always said, OK, it’s engineering, it’s art, it’s sound. What’s the overlap between engineering and production? What’s the overlap between art and sound? Are there interesting things to talk about there? Finding the right people to address [people] who live in those spaces and can share with the community, I think is going to be a big part of this year.”
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