A union yell, a Baldur's Gate tease, Star Wars feelings and a man who definitely did not make Balatro
Scenes from Game Developers Conference 2025
SAN FRANCISCO — I was expecting rain all week for the Game Developers Conference, so I packed an umbrella. It’s been chilly but I’ve barely felt a drop from the sky.
Perhaps the forecast was more miserable than reality. At least a little.
And perhaps that’s a metaphor at this year’s gathering of thousands of game developers. GDC seems less well-attended than in years past (official figures aren’t out yet) but some bright spots shine through so many creative people gather to talk about the work that they love—or want to love—doing.
I also packed an Xbox for this trip. I used that just a little more than an umbrella. Why I lugged one cross-country is a story for another day, but imagining a Series S stuffed into my messenger bag, along with a laptop, as I also pulled a suitcase. That might at least provide you a mental picture of your ambitious, nearly over-encumbered Game File newsletter writer, diving my marathon of GDC experiences, straight off the plane on Monday.
Some scenes from a packed past three days….
Monday, March 17
2 pm - I’m off my EWR-SFO flight, where the failure of the United Airlines in-flight WiFi helped me focus on drafting my Assassin’s Creed Shadows review. But I’ve got no time to check into my hotel. I haul my bundles to the Marriott Marquis for an interview with the CEO of [redacted; you’ll read about it in a future Game File]. In the elevator, there’s a baby in a stroller. “They like to start them in game development young,” someone in our car quips.
3:20 pm - Interview complete, I trundle over to the media check-in, pick up my badge, and see a NetEase PR person from afar. I miss my moment to check in and talk about, you know, but such are the fleeting near-misses that go along the chance encounters at a GDC.
3:50 pm - I’m at a GDC talk called By Any Other Name: A Linguist's Approach to Namecraft. It’s a dense 30-minute session by game developer Gerben Grave who has spent part of his career cooking up hundreds of names for games such as Age of Wonders. He wants to share some strategies. The gist of the talk is that you can start with some words you know, then keep transforming them. Add or remove letters. Observe rules of phonetics to avoid consonant combos that are hard to say. Mix in some care for making the fictional names memorable. And so on. Here’s a simple technique he shares, just to get people started…
4:40pm - Another talk, this one from Ubisoft’s Jean-Baptiste Siraudin. Game AI Summit: Designing Emotions in 'Star Wars Outlaws' Sabacc NPCs is my kind of granular talk. Is it a session about the grand open-world Star Wars Outlaws game? Nah. Is it a talk about the excellent card-game Sabacc that’s in Outlaws? No, still too broad. It’s about how the people making that Sabacc mini-game engineered a system so that the humans and aliens you play against in Sabacc can react with discernible emotions, based on whether they’re winning or losing. Siraudin explains how they cooked up an artificial intelligence scheme based on the non-player character’s beliefs about how they were doing during a round of Sabacc and how those beliefs changed during a match, affecting what they said or how they grunted, as they played.
Siraudin’s team also prototyped this system for the game’s Fathier-racing (read: Star Wars horse-racing game). Siraudin shares a URL of a playable prototype of the emotion system and he runs a clip of a Fathier race with an overlay showing how the contestants’ moods changed as the not-horses rounded the track. Additional nugget: They made the whole Sabacc mini-game, which could have been a 2024 contender for Mini-Game of the Year, in a little over a year.
9 pm — I’m at the Indie Mix Showcase. Before I enter, I’m chatting with some media peers who say they’ve just been to a meet-up for gaming press and that it’s all European folks. Their assessment: There aren’t many U.S. games reporters left. Grim.
At the showcase, there’s some neat and inspiring stuff. I play the sky-diving shooter DropShot. Developer, Neil “Aerial Knight” Jones tells me it was developed in two weeks. He explains that he’s shared builds with Patreon supporters for feedback and has used copyrighted music in it so that they won’t stream it—for risk of it getting flagged by copyright bots. Clever!
I learn that Beatdown City Survivors lets you combine a pigeon with a boot for an item that I’m told plays like Kuribo’s shoe.
Some developers, like one showing a French-Revolution-meets-Fire-Emblem-but-there-are-mechs game Bonaparte: A Mechanized Revolution, are stressed about how hard it is to get their games seen these days. I hear this a lot. There are So Many Games.
I flip a table in Table-Flip Simulator, and I add numbers correctly in the educational Doom-but-with-math shooter Eoprism. (They keep asking showgoers: “Do you like math?” Apparently I’m the only person to answer “yes.”)
The stand-out game of the MIX event is Take Us North, a game with social and light survival elements. You play as Clara, a woman who attempts to escort four people from Mexico, through the desert, up to the border with the U.S. Even the small slice they have at the show is powerful stuff.
Overheard during the Indie MIX event: “Programming is harder than design.”
Tuesday, March 18
11 am - I’ve posted my AC Shadows review and am power-walking to a meeting with Neowiz, the folks behind Lies of P. More on that chat coming to Game File in the future. One thing to share now: I couldn’t resist making a recommendation. Lies of P, you may know, is a Pinocchio-inspired game in the tradition of Dark Souls. The game’s lead developer, Jiwon Choi, tells me that reading the original Pinnochio book by Carlo Collodi convinced him that it’d be good material for a game. I wondered if he’d ever heard of the acclaimed Pinnochio graphic novel by the French cartoonist Winshluss. He had not, but I produce a listing of the book on Amazon (which reminds me that I bought my copy in 2011) and a colleague snaps a photo so they can investigate.
Noon - I’m back at my hotel, because I’d forgotten my conference badge. A hotel worker asks about all these gaming people in town. There’s a convention, I say. He likes the vibe. Not too crazy. Which ones get wild? “Those Salesforce ones are something else,” he says.
2 pm - I’m chatting with Dan Ayoub, senior vp for gaming at Wizards of the Coast. Most of that chat will be in a future Game File. Except for the part where he responds to my question about the status of a new Baldur’s Gate, now that BGIII studio Larian is committed to projects of its own. Wither a BG4? He says: “We're still determining the next steps for Baldur's Gate as a franchise. I will certainly tease you that…we'll be talking a little more about our thinking around Baldur's Gate in the very near future. Like, very near future.” I ask if that means an hour from now. He says no, not at this show. (Hours later, I see that IGN’s Rebekah Valentine had already extracted much the same comment from Ayoub before I’d even conducted my interview. Scooped by the best!)
5pm - I’m at an Xbox third-party game showcase, play some cool games, including Spices of Life, an upcoming cooking game from Gambir Studio. Chopping vegetables in it is very satisfying, as you can see in this clip I captured.
7pm - I have an impromptu pizza dinner with Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who is perpetually urging me to play more Blue Prince (I will, I will, now that that ACS review is up). At one point, we notice that my hands are looking blue. I’m not sure why. It washes off later but I make a mental note that I just briefly had blue (finger) prints. That’s weird.
Note: Today’s edition of Game File is free. But trips to GDC are not. This one will run me about $2,000. It has been extremely worth it, in terms of interviews, news tips and getting the word out about the newsletter. All of that helps me write better newsletters for tens of thousands of Game File subscribers. To support my work and enable me to attend shows like this, please consider signing up for a paid Game File subscription. Only if you can afford it, of course.
Wednesday, March 19
9:30am - I’m walking through San Francisco’s Union Square, past the spot where Nintendo will open a new store in mid-May.
Overheard during my walk: “But it is Nintendo. They live in their own world.”
10am - I’m at a Netflix event where they’re unveiling essentially phase two of their gaming plan (you guessed it— I’ll have more about that in a future Game File). The current/second head of gaming at Netflix, Alain Tascan, tells the audience: “We are not yet the Netflix of games, but that’s where we are heading.” He’s got some ambitious plans and wants to push innovative game design, among other things. He doesn’t make it sound like they’re just racing to make games that spin-off from their shows. We wind up having a lengthy chat later in the day.
Noon - I’m at Moscone West, one of the big conference halls for GDC, eating a $30 lunch that tastes like a $20 lunch. Soon enough, I’m chatting with other attendees around the table. Two of them are recently laid-off developers, one a student, one a recent graduate. It’s a challenging time, they all agree. The recent grad feels like his gaming degree was wasted. We encourage him to use his connections from school to find work. He laments the lack of Universal Basic Income. His frustration is palpable. I talk to the two laid-off devs about the fields getting hit the hardest. People in gaming narrative jobs seem to be getting cut a lot, I note, but maybe that’s more visible because some of them are former journalists? I wonder about programmers and engineers. One of the laid-off devs says that, actually, people got the memo a few years ago that those roles were more layoff-resistant field and flocked to them. Now it seems like there’s a surplus, they say. They know engineers who’ve been out of work for over a year.
4:30pm - I’m walking through the Yerba Buena park, on my way to interview Netflix’s Tascan, when I hear shouting. The newly announced North American video game union—United Video Game Workers CWA Local 9433—is holding a rally. I don’t quite catch the chant, but I think it might have ended with “United, we’re stronger!”
4:45pm - I’m chatting with a developer from Japan who is also in the park. They say they’re having a an awkward time with the “doom and gloom” at this year’s GDC, because they feel they are experiencing a gaming boom over in Asia. He’s not in denial about struggles here; just notes things feel different depending on where you are.
6:30pm - I’m backstage at the Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Choice Awards to interview winners. I have an interview gimmick for backstage, as always, though I’m not sure this one is a good enough idea. TBD for when I share the results. I’m with three other reporters, including the aforementioned Rebekah Valentine.
As the brilliant card game Balatro starts to win awards, we wonder if the game’s anonymous developer, LocalThunk, will show up. Word is, he’s at GDC. I’d even run into someone who told me they’d met him—and shared the detail that he’s handsome (!). The awards are playing on a TV, but with no sound. We see a quartet of people take the stage to accept Balatro’s second award. Could one of them be LocalThunk? We know who two of the men are. They work for the game’s publisher, Playstack. But there’s a third guy. He’s in a flashy card-themed jacket. He doesn’t seem to speak during the acceptance speech. He’s handsome enough.
Could it be…?We’re getting excited. But we rush to our chairs at the long table where we do these quick post-win interviews. Play it cool. Stay calm everyone!
The four Balatro people walk backstage, pose for a photo and then come over to chat with us. I’m first to ask any questions. I get right to the point. Sir, you in the card jacket, are you LocalThunk? He is not. He’s Naman Budhwar, also of Playstack. I acknowledge my mild disappointment, but offer a positive spin. “If it helps, I heard LocalThunk is handsome, and I did not rule out you being LocalThunk when I saw you.” He laughs.
Patrick, Liz, Wout and Naman from Balatro publisher Playstack. Nope, no LocalThunk there. Photo: Game File 11:30pm - I should be done for the day. Long ago. But I’m meeting up with a guy I’ve known in the games industry for a decades. He’s spinning up something that sounds cool and hypes me up on some up-and-coming publishers and studios I should keep an eye on. I spot a veteran PR person who sits down. How’s the show been for her? She’s excited to talk about the games she has, but the situation is rough. Indie publishing funds are shrinking. Bigger publishers are proving unreliable. The teams she’s working with are making cool stuff, she says. It’s not all bad for everyone, but it is for enough people. The storm clouds are still overhead.
Fun play by play! I’d kill to meet guy youve known in the games industry for a decades “spinning up something that sounds cool!”
Great write up and a fun read. Can’t wait to play Blue Prince thanks to you and Jason. Are you perhaps hinting at the mysterious ‘triple entendre’ that you revealed previously? 🧐