Post date: May 03, 2016 7:12:16 PM
My GDC experience this year was a lot better then the one i had last year. I meet a lot of cool and interesting people and got an overwhelmingly positive response regarding my portfolio. Here are some of my thoughts on GDC and what i observed.
1) VR was much more prevalent this year to a stagering dagree. All the major VR companies had booths and they even rivaled some of the big name developers and engines booths. Developers where even showing off their VR games and recruiting people to work on VR projects. This is a trend that has increased from last years show. This trend worries me because as much as ive heard people exited for VR ive heard just as many people voice concerns and even dislike for the new technology. Early reports of estimated the number of units the ocules would sell at launch was almost double the amount they actually did sell. I don't know much about how marketing or what classifies as a success when dealing with hardware but it seems that these companies are pumping a lot of resources into something that has a very nesh market.
2) Xbox was practically a no show this year. Last year both Xbox and Playstation had equally large booths next to one another with both of them showing off big name stuff. But this year Xbox wasn't on the floor and only had a lounge area with a handful of games they where releasing in the fallowing month or games that where all ready released. Microsoft had just closed two studios a few weeks before hand so the strange lack of a showing suggests that they are being really tight liped about whats going on. The poor performance of the Xbox one compared the the PS4 might have something to do with it or the lack of open positions at there studios might be another. What ever is going on its definitely something to keep an eye on.
3) When talking with recruiters this year compared to last year you can clearly see the push for PBR. More developers what people who know it and are integrating PBR into more and more engines. One of the big booths this year was lumberyard who has creating a plugin so that anything from substance will work on a one to one ratio. The substance booth was a lot bigger and much more active this year too. Its clear to me and many developers at the show that PBR is the new way to create materials and the industry is going hard in that direction.