f13.net

So there is a new thing called Pax Dev which is like GDC, except PAX.

Without getting into specifics IMO GDC is mostly useless garbage now and I welcome an alternative. Have not seen any other opinions on this.

How is it useless garbage, and how do you think PAX Dev will be better other than being run by Penny Arcade (who are admittedly a great bunch of people)?

That it coincides with PAX seems like a good deal.

GDC is almost all filler. Pointless "rant sessions" from non-developers, a million "how to market your iPhone game" sessions, company PR masquerading as sessions. A lot of the sessions, even ones that should be technical inside-baseball stuff, seem catered to students, journalists or people without any real know-how. Even the most technical sessions I've attended adopt this attitude of "well let's keep this at a high level because half this audience isn't sophisticated enough for anything else."

The number of sessions that seriously talk about game design and development in a way that is useful to professionals seems to be getting lower every year. A lot of the use for GDC for devs is just getting people in one place so you can have side meetings.

PAX Dev has no press, which is already a huge step up. GDC has a lot of events that are more for press than for actual developers, and the inclusion of press has IMO a watering-down effect on everything. For lack of a better term it's become a lot less "hardcore" from when it first started.

I'm looking at the GDC 2011 schedule builder for Wednesday, isolated to design-related sessions, and it's pretty barebones. Lots of sponsored stuff, lots of touchy-feely retrospectives, lots of "look at the game we just released" disguised as design.

From what I understand GDC began as a small number of smart dudes getting together to genuinely talk about game design and development. These days a lot of it is just if you are releasing a game try to get someone on your team to do a session somehow related to it as promotion, or if you are a self-promoter make sure you have a GDC session every year so you remain relevant. It's a lot of PR and careerism.

My specific hopes: No marketing/PR talks, no Zynga, no Chris Hecker, no sponsored sessions.