GEC BONUS EP: What's up at GDC 2026?
Takes so hot that they were recorded late at night after a long day on the GDC floor, and a couple of whiskeys.
Phillip Black, Eric Guan, and Christopher Kaczmarczyk-Smith unpack what actually mattered at GDC 2026, and what didn't.
We discuss:
- A sharper critique of industry thinking
- Too many taxonomy talks, not enough opinions
- Why game talks should behave more like economics seminars
- AI's role on the show floor and conference
- Shift from generative art hype to code generation and workflows
- Why survey data understates actual usage and masks revealed preferences
- AI present but muted, Web3 effectively gone
- The collapse of production costs and what replaces them
- Near-zero fixed costs leading to infinite content supply
- Discovery, marketing, and CAC as the new binding constraints
- Why incumbents may strengthen, not weaken
- Ad spend and distribution advantages widening the moat
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