Excellent news re: speakers getting a free one too.

Also – I remember the same deadline extensions Adam does, but I didn’t keep any of those emails either, as I considered them annoying, desperate spam. Sorry.

Having said that, I agree the special holiday deal ($100 off from the price through 1/23/09 to 01/08/10) _felt_ like the dates were extended.

I’m afraid I’ve deleted the emails that announced this, otherwise I’d copy/paste them here.

Off the top of my head, this year, I received:
– November: reminders of Alumni discount end
– December: reminders of early-bird discount end … extension of alumni discount … bonus discont code for non-alumni
– January: extension of early-bird discount … extension of bonus discount code … and a second bonus discount code when the first one finally stopped

Of those, most of them are “normal”, they happen every year. I do not remember the “new year’s discounts” from previous years. Im sorry if I’ve misunderstood, or misremembered.

Thanks for the corrections. I should have searched for some official stats when writing the post – I’m sorry.

However, at the same time, those figures sound very very different from the direct experiences of myself and everyone I talked to during the conference.

I’m not disagreeing with your figures, but I wonder if we can find an explanation for the discrepancy.

Interestingly, over the years, I’ve had CMP / TS staff quote (with absolute sincerity) wildly divergent figures for the same year. e.g. *for the same year* figures as divergent as “34,000″ and “22,000″, or “24,000″ and “15,000″. I believe this is due to different people counting “attendees” differently – and that everyone was correct.

So, I wonder if the overall figure for 2009 was almost level, but the figure for the core conference was down a lot, and the figure for the expo was up a lot?

My reference points:
– number of people inside lecture rooms
– number of people in primary meeting places (the W hotel, etc)
– number of people at parties (I go to approx 10 parties each year, so a fairly broad sample)
– named people I know who usually go to GDC but aren’t there that year
– number of people on the expo floor

For the past few years, I’ve gone to all 5 days of the conference.

At first, I thought 2009 was the same as 2008, despite a lot of my colleagues claiming that it was very quiet. I looked around and realised that they were right – major meeting places that were usually stnading room only were half empty. Then we got to day 3 (when the main conference starts), and the number of attendees didn’t seem to swell much at all, unlike most years.

The only thing that seemed as busy as normal, or more so, was the expo floor – but I haven’t spent much time on the expo floor for the past couple of years, so I’m only going by the impression I got from 20 minutes or so, and peeking in through the doors every time I walked past.

Also: ‘The marketing materials for the GDC this year have been unusually big on the discounts, with not just one but two public extensions of the discount deadlines.’ I don’t recall this, and I oversee the GDC team. I actually don’t remember any date extensions at all this year. We have tried to make passes more affordable to people by making lunches optional, as mentioned above. If that’s what you mean?

In general, I love you to bits, Adam, but you seem to just drift along crowbar-ing in facts to support the general gist of your rants, heh.

Sorry if I wasn’t clear – I meant that it was clearly the suppliers who were screwing the conference-organizers. “Cost price” of $40 is outrageously high.

But the price point on the food, you shouldn’t pick on actually. The Moscone has an exclusive caterer that all event organiser has to use as part of the use of the facility.
Exclusive Caterer. Offer. Demand.

GDC wasn’t making money on the food and that’s the very reason they move to the “bring your on food” policy. Otherwise, they would have stuck to the price and the margin.

As a sidenote, the GFG was a great event with a really good selection of speakers – mainly because they invited people they wanted to hear rather than opened for submissions.

Good point; although I wasn’t explicit, I was mainly thinking about commercial events.

However, most of the non commercial ones are run along the same lines.

I’ve also noticed that there are always special case exceptions, eg for keynote speakers (sometimes) and special speakers from minority attendee groups (eg westerners at Asian conferences and vice versa) – ie people who wouldn’t come at all otherwise.

Personally, i would prefer fewer conferences, higher quality.

But then again … With GDC being charged $40 for $5 of food in San Francisco each day (as revealed by this years “buy your own food at cost price” option) … Its clear that there’s a lot of flaws in the ecosystem of running conferences.

Anyone making a margin on the event is not paying. The reason is obvious and doesn’t bother me that much anymore.

There’s plenty I could usefully speak on, but I’ve done nothing new in games since last year, so why bother?

Really, I probably won’t be at GDC again until / unless the industry grows up and starts reimbursing speakers as standard. It’s sad and pathetic that no conference in the industry pays their speakers costs, let alone pays them for their time for speaking.

It’s possible that I may find myself at a large corporate again in the future who has the money and good enough reason to pay for me to travel to GDC, but otherwise I think not…