GDC 2023: all the latest from the Game Developers Conference – The Verge

AI offers new tools for making games, but developers worry about their jobs

2023-05-04T12:00:00-04:00

AI was a hot topic at the 2023 Game Developers Conference. | Image: GDC

For the most part, AI is exceptionally bad at illustrating hands. They come out six-fingered or four-fingered or, even worse, just some wispy ends that fade into the background. AI has been programming large Western 1940s-era smiles onto people of various cultures. It's been reshaping images we know and refitting them according to prompts. Depending on the data that it's fed, though, sometimes AI has solutions, and sometimes it doesn't.

Video game developers and AI companies want to use these AI tools to streamline game development and make it faster. They claim it could help solve the problem of video game crunch and automate some of the …

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GDC is exorbitantly expensive — but still vital for many game developers

2023-04-27T09:00:00-04:00

For this year's Game Developers Conference, over 28,000 people showed up to San Francisco, California, in March to talk, listen, play, and network. Developers gathered to hear presentations on how to hone their craft, meet with peers, and conduct business. The experiences facilitated by GDC keep fledgling games alive, get them vital exposure, and provide opportunities for developers to meet the people that can help them break into the industry or simply provide advice for their games. Yet, for how important GDC is as a professional event, it remains wildly out of reach to a lot of people for whom it provides the most benefit: the developers …

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Why classic gaming names like Atari and MapleStory are still going in on the blockchain

2023-04-13T12:00:00-04:00

MapleStory is the rare 2003 game that's still going to this day, despite its reputation for being a pay-to-win grind fest. So perhaps it's fitting that its developers want to bring the title to the blockchain next, complete with non-fungible tokens, its own cryptocurrency, and the possibility of playable Bored Apes.

A lot of games have died in the timeframe that MapleStory has existed. I grew up playing the side-scrolling multiplayer game in elementary school and decided to revisit it in college. Back in 2015, I was surprised to find the game still had a robust community powered by a few "whales," or people who tend to spend significant amo …

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Fortnite and Roblox are dueling for the future of user-built games

2023-04-07T13:00:00-04:00

We're racing toward a world where Fortnite and Roblox could rival Steam and the App Store in terms of the size of their game libraries. Both have growing ecosystems of millions of players who build and spend time in custom battle royales, chat rooms, and all kinds of other games. We're looking at the fight for what could be the next YouTube.

While the two giants may be the biggest in the space, they are far from the only companies building out a catalog of tools that make the jump from game playing to game making far simpler than traditional game engines Unity or Unreal. All sorts of platforms, including the browser-based dot big bang and …

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Minecraft Legends is a blast in multiplayer

2023-04-06T08:00:00-04:00

Minecraft Legends is a strategy spinoff of Minecraft - but it might also be the next competitive multiplayer craze. I had a chance to spend a few hours with the game last month at GDC in San Francisco, and while it seems like it has a solid campaign to dig into, I had a lot more fun with the team-based multiplayer. It's kind of like Minecraft mashed with League of Legends and StarCraft, and in the one match I played, it involved a lot of yelling (in a good way).

Legends is built on the same "bedrock" engine as the main Minecraft game, and the two look pretty much identical. You control a blocky little character running through a similarly b …

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The shape of Kirby

2023-03-31T08:30:00-04:00

The line for the "Many Dimensions of Kirby" panel at GDC was so long that it stretched from the doors of the conference room, wrapped around the third floor of the main hall of the Moscone Center, and continued out onto the roof. The presentation was given by Kirby's stepdads, general director for the Kirby franchise Shinya Kumazaki and director of Kirby and the Forgotten Land Tatsuya Kamiyama. It covered the design challenges the team at HAL Laboratory faced trying to make 3D action Kirby games. But more than that, the presentation and my subsequent chat with the two directors afterward revealed a bit of insight into the mind and ethos of K …

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Danganronpa’s creator wants to make detective games more approachable

2023-03-29T14:00:00-04:00

Master Detective Archives: Rain Code. | Image: Spike Chunsoft

While detective stories are a mainstay in the worlds of film, television, and literature, they're comparatively niche when it comes to video games. And with a few notable exceptions, the most beloved detective games tend to be visual novels. Kazutaka Kodaka loves detective stories and is best known for the dark adventure series Danganronpa. But for his studio's next project, Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, he decided to take things in a slightly different direction. "Mystery games tend to be dull because it's mostly reading text," Kodaka says. "But for this we created a world where you can solve various kinds of mysteries and roam arou …

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How Wordle lives on at The New York Times

2023-03-29T13:00:00-04:00

Depending on who you ask, the biggest video game last year wasn't the award-winning Elden Ring: it was actually Wordle. The word game continued to take the world by storm in 2022, beating out Queen Elizabeth and the election results in search volume. It was purchased by The New York Times in January 2022, and though its user growth has plateaued, it still has more daily active users than other newspaper offerings like the crossword puzzle or sudoku.

"When we bought Wordle, our main mission was don't break anything. Just let it keep going," said Zoe Bell, executive producer at The New York Times, in an interview. "Then over time, we shifted …

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Life by You is trying to shake up life sims with a greater sense of freedom

2023-03-28T11:00:00-04:00

Life by You. | Image: Paradox Interactive

Rod Humble knows a bit about life sim games. He spent years as an executive at EA helping steer The Sims franchise before leaving to join Second Life maker Linden Lab. So when it came for his new studio, Paradox Tectonic, to try its hand at the genre, he knew exactly what he wanted to change. "What the genre needed was less constraints," Humble says.

The studio's first release, Life by You, was officially unveiled last week ahead of the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. It looks similar to The Sims but with a few important differences. For one thing, in place of the iconic (and fictional) Simlish, Life by You utilizes a pr …

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Fortnite’s generous new creator economy has an Epic catch

2023-03-28T07:00:00-04:00

Epic Games is changing the way Fortnite creators are paid, and it could have a transformative effect on the ecosystem of the game. Now, 40 percent of all the money Epic rakes in from Fortnite - hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions - is up for grabs.

Last week, Epic introduced what it calls "Creator Economy 2.0." Under the new system, Epic will pay out 40 percent of Fortnite's net revenues each month to creators based on how much players engage with their islands. That means 40 percent of the money Epic makes from things like V-Bucks, its Fortnite Crew subscription, and in-game outfits (like for crossovers like YouTube superstar …

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