In a rather upsetting bit of news from earlier this week, it has been announced that GDCE is no more.

I have been a conference associate at GDCE for the past 5 conferences in Cologne, Germany, flying in from Israel for the opportunities it and Gamescom provided.

While I would love to follow UBM Tech's suggestion to attend GDC in San Francisco, I'm not sure I could even manage to provide enough ties to my home country to secure the required tourist visa.

While I'm not quite broke, I work for a minimum hourly wage, and such a trip is no small burden, even if I can get in as an International Ambassador (as a foreign national I can't CA) and take advantage of my family in Berkeley to save on accommodation.

Now I'm trying to think of my options.

I would still like to attend Gamescom for the opportunity to meet devs, show off my portfolio and hope that maybe this time I'll finally get my big break and get a solid lead on a job. Hopefully I'll meet some of the friends I've made over the years volunteering.

I guess I need to wait and see what happens with Respawn, maybe it will turn into a better alternative to GDCE than it has been in the past couple of years.

I've also volunteered at Casual Connect over the past 2 years when it was held in Tel-Aviv. They say they like to relocate every couple of years, I'll watch to see where they go, and decide what to do, even if the volunteer experience is somewhat inferior.

There are a few other conferences to look at which might be interesting: Reboot, Quo Vadis, Pocket Gamer Connects, CEGC and more.

There is also the option to go further from Europe. I've attended Tokyo Game Show and G-Star before, maybe I'll add China Joy to the list. The language barrier proved to be a big issue in Asia, even if I am willing to learn, so it might not be as effective for the job searching efforts, and volunteering is unlikely, so it will also be a big financial burden, but it ought to be fun...

Um, any source on that?

part of a mail that was send to previous attendees (although 2016 was the first one in three years I didn't attend)

Join 27,000+ Game Developers at GDC in San Francisco

Thanks for attending GDC Europe 2016! Unfortunately, Game Developers Conference Europe 2016 will be our last European event, as we concentrate on making the 'main event' even larger. But as Europe’s game market continues to mature, we’ve seen a sharp rise in participation at GDC in San Francisco. Moving forward, GDC will increase efforts to support the growth of European game professionals at the annual global event.

Thank you for attending GDC Europe over the years and helping to create a forum for learning, networking, and inspiration! If you can make it, we’d love to invite you to attend GDC in San Francisco 27 February - 3 March, 2017 - with more than 27,000 attendees, 500+ sessions and game developers from around the world.

Register by 18 January to save up to $700.*

Game Developers Conference Europe® c/o UBM
303 Second St., Suite 900 South Tower, San Francisco, CA 94107

Interesting. I wonder why, low attendance?

Googling around I see SF's GDC had around 25k attendees whereas GDC Europe had around 2k. That is quite a difference. But I cant seem to find any list per year or something like that.

Googling around I see SF's GDC had around 25k attendees whereas GDC Europe had around 2k. That is quite a difference. But I cant seem to find any list per year or something like that.

That is kinda low. Australia's wannabe-GDC (GCAP) had 800 (which was the event capacity / sold out).

Getting to GDC has always been hard from this side of the world too, so we rely on government grants to make the trips affordable... but seeing that any country in the EU is bordering a whole bunch of other developed countries, I'm guessing it would be harder to convince government that they should fund industry networking trips half way around the world.

Time to cut the head off the snake.

I don't have an official reason on the closure, but there's the following to consider:

GDC Europe seems to have been shrinking over the years, dropping Wednesday to go to a Mon-Tue show. Having to compete with Gamescom's preview day might have been the root cause.

Over the past couple of years, there was also Respawn in direct competition with GDCE, even though there some cooperation between all these shows (GDCE, Respawn and Gamescom.)

This year, to solve the issue they had in 2015 when it was too close to E3, Gamescom announced the show will be on fixed dates: the third week of August, IIRC, along with the announcement that they are shifting days to Tues-Sat (From Wed-Sun) which changes the dynamics of the cooperating conferences. Respawn has announced they will be adjusting their dates, and now there's a rumor going that they will replace GDCE at Koelnmesse.

Some say that the sheer amount of events in the European continent throughout the year, and the size of GDC, kept GDCE from being the one event to go to in Europe, and that it made sense to kill it, but it doesn't make it easier.