With this year’s Game Developers Conference now in full swing, it’s time to take a look at what has happened so far and what’s in store for the rest of the week.
What is the Game Developers Conference? GDC is an annual conference where game developers and video game industry professionals converge in San Francisco every March, for a week full of sessions from key industry leaders, video game announcements, game development tool announcements and more.
Valve… and Half Life 3?
Valve, well known for its DRM software Steam and the Half Life video game series, has made some of the largest announcements so far this week at GDC 2015. They started with the reveal of a brand new VR headset called The Vive, which is being co-developed with popular smartphone manufacturer HTC. Check out Polygon’s hands-on with the device here. Do you think The Vive will become the next Oculus competitor?
Valve also announced version two of its Source game development engine, and it’s going to be free for developers. This is big news, since the last iteration of Source came out almost 11 years ago, and since then other engines such as Unreal and Unity have taken the limelight due to their open source nature (both of which were also updated this week). With Source 2, will we finally see a Half Life 3? Don’t get your hopes up just yet. More info on the announcement here on TechCrunch.
Ninja Metrics at GDC 2015
On Tuesday, our CEO Dmitri Williams spoke about the social impact in design and acquisition at GDC. During his session, Dmitri announced a new Global Social Value® report analyzing the influence of 365M+ video game players from around the world (for a visual recap of the report, check out our infographic of it here), revealing that developing countries have a larger impact on games revenue that we thought.
Today, Dmitri will be speaking about game analytics starting at 3PM PT in Room 2020 of the West Hall. If you’re currently attending GDC 2015 and would like to attend the session, click here for more information.
Nvidia Shield
Several companies have been attempting to bring PC gaming to your living room as of late, with devices such as Amazon’s Fire TV and Steam Machines (and now, Steam’s underwhelming Steam Link streaming device).
But the most exciting set-top box gaming announcement this week was the Nvidia Shield, a $200 Android powered micro console that streams video games to your TV in 4K resolution. It’s only 8.3 inches on its longest side, and boasts a pretty powerful Tegra X1 GPU for such a small size.
The Nvidia Shield is planning to launch with over 50 games including the latest Borderlands and the upcoming Witcher 3. Check out coverage of the announcement here on Digital Trends.
