We bought GDC all access passes this year and I am sickened to learn it no longer includes access to the GDC vault. Also super annoying that I get spam marketing emails constantly now, because informatech sold my personal information.
I swear some unsubscribe forms exist to play by the rules but don't actually do anything. I've gotten spam emails from "enterprise db" about webinars I'm not interested in for I don't know how long now. They've got one of those generic unsubscribe links[1] that doesn't have a URL built for your email and makes you type the email yourself, so I have to check which of my several addresses they're sending emails to (my org gives a few emails that forward to the same place). But even after doing that like a dozen times with different email addresses they continue to email me. I mark them as spam now and blocked the address.
I suspect that some organizations have broken unsubscribe systems or you just end up getting repopulated from one of the thousand email lists you're on. If it's not a one or two click unsubscribe (e.g. doesn't require manually entering email), I'm pretty close to reporting SPAM and blocking at that point.
What's stopping you? I've worked on the technical side of implementing opt-outs in email newsletters. If you screw it up, you get spam complaints. That's the incentive to do it right.
Speaking about GDC, if you're into game development or just curious, this talk is legendary and inspirational to aspiring game devs (and very intertaining to boot):
"In this GDC 2018 talk, Spiderweb Software's Jeff Vogel presents a retrospective on his company's history and how they've managed to stay in the game-making business since 1994."
Maybe someone here can help me. There was a GDC presentation in the late nineties or maybe 2000 or so. The speaker was from EA maybe, having worked a lord of the rings game maybe?
His whole pitch, which came with movies, was if someone did Mario in the style of lord of the rings. There was a scene where luigi dies and Mario weeps. Bowser makes a great speech before his assembled armies which finishes with “and KILL THE PRINCESS!”
Can’t remember who or when. Did I just hallucinate the whole thing? Anyone got a link?
This is so much better than what GDC is today. All these talks are practical talks that will teach you how to do things. Even though they are 24 years old, many of them are still relevant. GDC today is all about advocacy, business talks and developers behind big name titles sharing platitudes. My first GDC was in 2000, and I go every year, but in the last few years i don't bother with any of the talks, and just hang out with friends.
There are still lots of good tech and design talks, it’s just that as you get older and more experienced, your standards for what is interesting and worth your time get more strict.
I agree. I've been going since 2010 and it's much harder to hear something new -- and I don't feel it's conference quality. The biggest challenge for an attendee is the roll of the dice if the talk you go to will be quality. This year, anything with the word "AI" in it was basically garbage talks with companies posturing and hand waving about how they will use LLMs/etc.
My expectation when I go to GDC is that if I leave with three insights I wouldn't otherwise have had, it was worth the cost.
The talks were good because we needed them. Just imagine what it was like in the '90s. There were almost no books written about game development and only one or two were any good. Everybody had Understanding Comics and maybe sometime Design of Everday Things because they were useful. In 1995 I read a bunch of post mortems and design docs from Activision and Infocom to learn what to do. And being more experienced I would realize even that was a little silly. The head of QA says we didn't test enough, the programmer (they didn't really always have leads) would say we need to re-engineer.. etc.
Nice, thank you! For me there are several no-gos, such as advertisements and it not being FOSS but for the majority of people it looks like the perfect choice.
Honestly disgusting exploitation of knowledge.
GDC needs real competition.