GDC to return as a physical event in 2022

With GDC 2021 kicking off as an online event yesterday, Informa Tech has confirmed that next year’s event will once again be a physical conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Next year’s conference will take place from March 21 – 25, 2022, and submissions to present lectures, roundtables and panels will be accepted from August 3 – 31, 2021.

The return to a March GDC means less time than usual between conferences, with this year’s GDC kicking off online yesterday, offering a week of lectures, tutorials, roundtable discussions and more.

Additionally, while this year’s conference is described as being “built from the ground up to take advantage of being a virtual conference,” there is no mention of if GDC 2022 will maintain some of the online elements introduced during the pandemic.

“We are thrilled to be launching the most robust virtual GDC event to date, which offers a huge amount of unique content from across the industry and benefits from our learnings from the past more than a year of digital GDC events,” said Katie Stern who oversees the GDC as VP of Entertainment Media at Informa Tech. “We also absolutely look forward to the return of GDC 2022 to San Francisco next year and for the opportunity to see this vibrant community together again in person.”

This year’s event will feature expert talks on game development topics such as design, business and marketing, visual arts and game narrative, as well as postmortems led by the developers of Quake and Star Wars Galaxy. the multipart presentation “The Developer’s Impact”, delivered by Lyndsay Pearson (Executive Producer & GM, ‘The Sims’, Maxis), Ziba Scott (Optimist, Popcannibal) and Osama Dorias (Lead Game Designer, Warner Brothers Games Montreal).