Four Things from GDC
1. AI Won, and We're Finally Starting to Get It
The reality is that AI is our next and biggest wave of opportunity. There is nothing else on the horizon, and even Roblox looks margin-shrinking. It's AI or bust. It's taken the game industry a very long time to wake up. We've moved far too close to entertainment rather than technology.
From what I saw at the conference, the engineers are starting to play. This is incredibly important because the biggest imagination executives have is making more widgets at a lower cost.
2. Indies Will Lead the AI Wave, They Just Don't Know It
A couple of AI-native games like AiZU & hideout, made by young developers, gave me hope that the industry's creative lion is starting to awaken. It's by young teams with strong engineering backgrounds and close university connections. A segment of the population that should have been making games for the last 30 years, and yet somehow we've missed out on flipping into game devs.
I don't expect the likes of Tencent or Scopely to understand anything beyond "does AI slash this cosmetic content cost in half?" Still, in the innovator's dilemma, it will be the indies who rise and take advantage of the new technology. The Steam bulwarks and internet bandwagoning play a significant role in this movement, but it's a small battle in the face of a very clear tide of war.
3. No One Knows How to Take Roblox Seriously
Roblox didn't have a significant presence at the conference, but some Roblox developers did. While everyone is curious about the platform, the margins are crushing, and it's hard to scale a business. Adam Telfer is right: what to do about Roblox? With such a different audience and content paradigm, it feels like a growing parallel world, and in some ways, maybe becomes the third estate, with HD and mobile as the other two worlds.
4. American Supply-Side is Hunting, but China Demand-Side is Too
I've started to see Chinese expansion less as a form of manifest destiny and more as a desperation for growing markets. In the category of 4xx, for example, while Chinese firms dominate the supply side, the demand side continues to be, and not only continues to be but is increasingly driven by the American consumer. The Chinese presence continues to grow at the conference, at all seniority levels, and it's certainly welcome. The game developer conference is not segmented by region, but the purpose still feels strategic for the nation.
Ultimately, American irrelevance will only occur if growth slows. Sorry, Europeans. It's a truly astounding puzzle how the United States continues to grow despite so many bad policy choices. AI has again placed it at the center of global economic development;
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