I never fail to be amazed by GDC’s admission price, which seems to track the price of housing in Silicon Valley much better than the rate of inflation in the United States…
Yeah, it keeps out the riff-raff. Of course, some of us riff-raff have other ways of attending that don’t require shelling out $1750.
Much to my chagrin, GDC has become a “big-money” event complete with fluffy awards shows and the like. The Choice Awards are admittedly better than most because they’re essentially peer awards, but it’s still more fun to hide in the back (where the food is) with your buddies and heckle. :twisted:
- Alan
The GDC has been essentially useless since the infamous sellout to Miller Freeman. For those not in the know: The rest of the GDC Board (the CGDC back then) wanted the MF money, but Chris Crawford said no, making a profit wasn’t what they were supposed to be about. He still had influence, so the Board backed down. Then they waited for him to go out of town, held a meeting within an hour of his plane taking off, stripped him of his shares, kicked him off the board and sold out to MF. Oh, and demanded an NDA that prevented either side from talking in public about how much money the board members were paid in the sale.
The cost of the GDC the year of the hijacking? $250, so that anyone could afford to come. The cost the next year? $600. The price has been all uphill from there, espeically since CMP got involved, and now individuals can’t afford to attend unless their company is going to pay for it. This is so antithetical to the original charter that it boggles the mind.
It used to be that the GDC was incredibly useful; the seminars, lectures and roundtables were informative and the atmosphere was one of an ethos to spread the word and nurture the industry and individuals. Now it is about the bucks, with the same old people talking about the same old things and with preference going to know-nothings willing to plant their tongues firmly between CMP’s buttocks and hum. You can still learn something, because some good people do still get in to speak, but most of it is useless dreck.
Yeah, I’m only a tad bitter about it.
Seems like a load of rubbish to me - I can’t see what the hell that money is buying.
Needless to say, I didn’t get the giga pass. Thankfully it is a business expense for me. I basically go for the networking and maintaining relationships, the sessions are mostly a wash. Roundtables can be fun though (hi Dave!)
Yeah, no giga pass here either. It’s cheaper the earlier you register, but it’s still painful.
Despite all this, I still find GDC useful, at least for now…
Yeah, what Jessica said.
I attended GDC from 1997-2000 and the only consistently positive part was the suite crawl due to all the networking opportunities presented therein. This was, of course, ruined in 1999 by idiotic hotel security who closed it off at random to legit attendees citing fire concerns.
Shortly thereafter, I wrote a scathing rant about what GDC had come to on Usenet. Tapping a nerve, it ignited a huge flame war, out of which I got a free GDC T-shirt and the opportunity to talk about being an underdog at GDC 2000, at a seminar organized by a pack of subversives within the dominant paradigm so to speak.
I’ve not found any strong reason to attend since then but I do enjoy tracking the ridiculous price inflation. I was happy to see the spinoff hardcore physics/graphics conference die a quick and painful death after two iterations though.
SIGGRAPH OTOH is more fun than a barrel of monkeys if you ask me…
Count me in as a SIGGRAPH fan.