Hello! First of all: altGDC is happening.
The organizing team has spent the past week talking to potential venues, sponsors, and speakers for an event that matches our goals. Our goals with altGDC are to:
Provide a space for the indie game community to share knowledge, network, and hang out in a welcoming social setting.
Live-stream and record talks so that GDC speakers can still reach their audience, and their audience can still benefit from their insights.
The continued industry response to COVID-19 has made our original plan, to host an in-person conference for about 150 of you amazing people, difficult. Here’s what our current plan is:
The altGDC talk track is going to be streamed on Twitch, but will not have a physical presence for non-speakers. For speakers who will still be in San Francisco, we’ll be providing a semi-professional video recording studio you can use.
The altGDC hallway track will be a mixture of Discord chat channels, Discord voice channels, and the Twitch chat. We’re going to find ways to make it feel as close to in-person as possible, including having speaker drop-ins and organizing special virtual events. We’ll also share information about altGDC watch parties as we hear of them.
The altGDC party track will happen in the evenings with all the parties we can find or throw, and we’ll be sending out more details as they emerge.
While this isn’t everything that we originally hoped for, we’re still committed to hosting the best event we can, and we hope you’ll join us.
For right now, the things you can do to help are:
Encourage more speakers to fill out our Call for Proposals, which closes end-of-day Sunday.
Encourage companies – perhaps a company you work for! – to sponsor us so we can pay for live-captioning and transcriptions of all talks.
Encourage more people to sign up for this mailing list, so they can join you for altGDC.
Thanks for reading, and we’ll be back next week with our speaker lineup!