u/Klightgrove

thank you everyone who participated!

I received an email today from a fellow indie dev asking me what my experience was like having Playreach do marketing for my game Éalú. The thing is... I've never hired a marketing company as my team is tiny and self funded.

Sure enough their website claims to have very successfully marketed our game for us and, news to us, that we were part of Next Fest (that would have been cool if it were true)

The dev that asked me for a reference for this company served as an excellent reminder to vet companies that contact me, thought I'd pass that reminder along.

All of 2024 and previous years are also free on the GDC Vault. One of the major standouts to me was the Outersloth talk on funding, with a major caveat being this is about funding games not seeking funding from a publisher.

This is incredibly helpful as scheduling conflicts plagued the conference along with long lines for in-demand talks. I'm excited to finally get to look at the sessions I had to miss.

Quick link to access all of the free GDC 2026 talks: https://gdcvault.com/free/gdc-26/

For the rest of the content, as you might expect it's all under https://gdcvault.com/free/

Unsure how long these will stay up, what are some standout sessions you think people should make sure they watch in the meanwhile? For those who were at GDC, what was the best talk of 2026?

A curation of ones I liked:

• Pacific Drive Survival Fundamentals
• Building a Licensed Game as an indie
• POIs for the outer worlds 2
• LiveOps Scaled an Indie Hit

Might be updating this list as I watch some of the other talks!

First off, I want to apologize to the community. It has been almost 2 months since GDC concluded and I have not finished my articles on the takeaways from the production workshops and lectures. Everywhere you look online you see content for engineering, game design, art, but it's rare finding opportunities for someone to pick up skills they can apply for getting a role as a producer.

That's also why I think the current summit happening today is a good opportunity for people to pick up skills they can apply to their projects whether we are talking about shipping an indie game, trying to make a demo for a jam, or getting familiar with a studio environment.

At GDC I met plenty of people aiming to get a job as a producer, but entry-level roles aren't widely available anymore. For those who are looking for a production job, Glitch just opened up a remote production coordinator role for the west coast along with a production manager job. They are also seeking a head of games, if anyone here wants to build a studio up.

The limited opportunities are why I believe the community should always share its knowledge, so students and indies can gain the skills they need to excel independently. Below are a track listing of some of the talks I believe will be good.

1. Kari Koivistoinen - Building Worlds, Not Burnout: Agile Inside Modern Game Studios
2. Umar Ijaz - Independent Game Development: The Natural Home For Agile
3. Clinton Keith - Game Development, as we know it, is ending, and it could get a lot better.
4. Joshua Thaler - Building teams that AI can't replace
5. Dan Hollinger - Don't just expect for things to go wrong, plan for it, a guide for disasters

There are 3 other tracks and plenty of other videos uploaded to YouTube that might also be relevant to game development. Major disclaimer is these will only be up this week and will be taken down unless you have a paid summit ticket, so better hop to that 2x watching. There are also live Q&A's you can join after signing up for them for free.

I'm just starting the game track keynote this morning with my coffee and see takeaways should be shared in the comments below.

For reference the summit information can be found at here: https://globalagilesummit.com/#schedule

At GDC, the United Videogame Workers announced the creation of a digital developer-ran conference to compete against the rising costs of physical events like GDC. We are 18 days out from this conference and they have only revealed 4 additional panels alongside the original 8 they had slated out.

As a high level we have the following categories represented in the known panels:

• Q&A's with journalists and voice actors
• Activism panels and unionization
• Post-mortems

Noticeably absent so far are the technical talks you would find at other grassroots conferences like NotGDC, ThinkyCon, GameLoop, and SLICE. They promise there are dozens of speakers covering industry skills but we are still waiting to see what they have in store, hopefully sooner than latter so we can plan our schedule out and know what talks to watch.

The main driving force behind this initiative was the UVW, which began at GDC 2025 and grew to 550 members over the last year. They've been poised to release a "Game Workers Bill of Rights", which was read out during a march at the Yerba Buena Gardens last March. The contents of that bill are currently only known to the 40 or so people who attended the event and we are waiting to see it shared online.

Overall, the UVW seems to want to upset the status quo and democratize game developer conferences, but there is massively little visibility on both their activity and this new event. What things have you all heard about the GWC and are there any panels you are looking forward to?

For reference the link to the conference: https://gameworkersconference.org/