How to Choose Which Game Industry Events Are Worth Your Time and Money:
Every developer who has tried to plan a year of conference travel has run into the same wall: there are too many events, limited budget, and no clear way to know which ones will actually move the business forward. Guy Blomberg has spent close to two decades inside that problem, both as an attendee trying to make smart choices and as an organizer trying to build events worth attending.
Guy joined Jay Powell, CEO of the Powell Group and Blue Ridge Games, on the IndieGameBusiness® podcast for a fireside chat covering how to evaluate game industry events, why GDC remains both expensive and difficult to skip, what makes regional conferences valuable in a different way, and how developers should prepare to actually get something out of the events they choose. Guy’s background includes organizing PAX in Australia and North America, running large events across Europe and Southeast Asia, working on E3, serving as event director for DreamHack, and currently building out the Gaming Community Expo in Orlando. He also runs the Games Industry Gathering, a large networking group that started during the pandemic, and works as business development director for Stride PR.
Start With Your Goal, Not the Guest List:
Guy’s foundational point is that there is no universal answer to which events are worth attending. The right choice depends entirely on what a person or studio is trying to accomplish.
He broke down a few common goals and how they change the calculation:
- Trying to break into the industry. A C-suite focused conference like DICE is not the right venue. Large international conventions in countries you have no existing connection to are also a poor fit at this stage.
- Trying to switch careers within the industry. Different events make sense here, generally ones with strong networking infrastructure aimed at industry professionals rather than consumers.
- A developer looking for a publisher. Business-to-business events where publishers and scouts are actually present and looking for new titles matter more than consumer-facing shows.
One distinction Guy returned to repeatedly is the difference between consumer events and business events. A lot of people default to familiar names like Comic-Con or PAX without understanding that these are built for fans, not for business development. There is industry presence at those shows, but they are not designed or structured as B2B events. Choosing the wrong category of event for your actual goal wastes both money and time.
The Three Categories of Game Industry Events:
Guy organizes the events landscape into three broad categories, each with a different value proposition:
- Consumer events. These can be hyper-localized or fully global. PAX, DreamHack, and the consumer side of Gamescom all fall into this bucket. The audience is players, not industry professionals, though industry presence exists alongside the consumer experience.
- Smaller regional gaming events. These tend to be more localized conferences, the kind of regional events that pop up around the country and globally. Smaller attendance, usually a few hundred to around a thousand people, but a much higher density of meaningful, repeated contact with the same people.
- Global tentpole events. Gamescom, Tokyo Game Show, and GDC fall here. These bring in such scale that almost anyone you want to meet is likely to be there, but the competition for everyone else’s attention is intense, which makes them more effective for people who already have existing relationships with the people they are trying to meet.
Each category serves a different function. Consumer events build broad visibility and player feedback. Regional events build deep relationships through repeated contact. Tentpole events offer breadth and access to nearly anyone in the industry, at the cost of fragmented, rushed interactions.
Why GDC Is Still Worth the Conversation, Even With the Complaints:
Jay was upfront about his frustration with GDC, calling it expensive, increasingly emptied out on the show floor, and a source of long-running personal irritation. Guy did not disagree with the criticisms but made a case for why GDC still matters.
The cost argument is real. Getting to San Francisco, finding lodging, and registering for the show easily runs into thousands of dollars for an American developer, and significantly more for international attendees. But Guy’s counterpoint was about scale and infrastructure rather than cost. GDC still brings in twenty to thirty thousand industry professionals, along with students and others. That breadth is difficult to replicate anywhere else in the United States.
San Francisco’s role as a hub is not just about convenience. A large share of game companies, developers, journalists, and creators are already based there or nearby, which means the infrastructure supporting a major industry event already exists in that location. Guy compared this to the idea of moving GDC elsewhere: it might make sense logistically, but the show would lose the surrounding density of industry presence that makes it valuable in the first place.
Guy and Jay both raised E3 as a cautionary tale. E3 imploded in part because it lost its sense of purpose, originally serving retailers and traditional media, then struggling to redefine itself as content creators and digital distribution changed how games reached players. Once E3 collapsed, nothing fully replaced its role as the central American tentpole event. Guy’s concern is that if GDC follows the same path, the industry will not get a clean replacement. It will instead fragment into a patchwork of smaller, less centralized events that never quite recreate what a single major hub provided.
What Actually Happens on the Show Floor vs Where the Real Business Gets Done:
One point Jay raised, which Guy agreed with, is that the actual show floor at GDC has become less relevant for most attendees. The booths matter primarily for hardware companies and major announcements. For most developers, publishers, and investors, the real activity happens away from the floor entirely: in MeetToMatch meeting areas, in hotel lobbies, and across the city in scheduled one-on-ones.
That shift matters for how developers should think about planning their time at large events. If you are an indie developer without a booth in the dedicated indie area, treating the show floor as the primary destination is a mistake. The value is in the meetings you schedule before you arrive and the relationships you maintain across the surrounding days, not in walking the floor.
The Case for Regional and Smaller Events:
While tentpole events offer reach, Guy made a strong case for the relationship-building value of smaller, regional conferences. At events like the UMEA Dev Conference in Northern Sweden, or many of the regional shows across the United States, the entire schedule tends to be more communal. Dinners happen together. Evenings are spent at the same handful of venues. Repeated contact across a few days builds trust in a way that bouncing between back-to-back fifteen-minute meetings at a massive show cannot replicate.
Guy distilled his approach to industry relationships into a simple sequence: build the relationship, identify the opportunity, close the deal. That sequence works best in environments where there is enough unstructured time to actually build something resembling a relationship, which tends to favor smaller events over sprawling ones.
The tradeoff is breadth. A developer who only attends regional events will get to know a smaller set of people very well, but will miss the volume of contacts and the chance discoveries that come from being in a room with twenty or thirty thousand industry professionals. Guy’s recommendation for developers with limited travel budgets is to be intentional about which type of value they are optimizing for in a given year, rather than trying to do both at once with insufficient resources for either.
Why Events Need to Actively Support Indie Developers:
Guy was direct about a structural challenge facing event organizers: individual indie games rarely sell tickets on their own. Most events generate revenue by convincing people to attend, and a single small indie title is not usually enough of a draw to justify booth space on its own merits.
His recommendation to event organizers is to stop treating indie games as individual booths competing for ticket-selling power and instead treat a collection of indie games as a feature of the show. Thirty, fifty, or sixty indie games together become a discoverability section, a place attendees go specifically because they expect to find something unexpected and interesting. That reframing changes indie game space from a hard sell into a meaningful draw.
Guy’s practical suggestions for how events should support developers include:
- Offering free or discounted booth space for early-stage indie developers
- Treating a cluster of indie titles as a discoverability feature rather than individual line items competing for ticket sales
- Creating a path where successful indie developers graduate into larger, paid booth space as their game and studio grow
- Bringing in publishers and scouts specifically to engage with the indie section rather than leaving developers to find their own audience
- Targeting underserved regions where developers do not already have several large local events to choose from
What Developers Should Actually Do to Prepare for an Event:
Toward the end of the conversation, Guy gave concrete, practical advice for developers heading into any major event, using the Gaming Community Expo as the working example.
Define your metric for success before you go. Some developers treat an event as a milestone deadline, a forcing function to have a build ready by a certain date. Others go specifically to playtest and gather feedback. Others are explicitly trying to reach scouts, publishers, investors, media, or content creators. All of these are valid goals, but you need to know which one you are pursuing so you can evaluate afterward whether the trip was worth the money and time.
Practical steps Guy recommended:
- Follow the social media accounts of the people you want to connect with, since many will post which events they are attending
- Search relevant event hashtags across platforms to identify who else is attending and reach out before the event to schedule meetings
- Join or create a dedicated WhatsApp or Discord channel for attendees heading to the same event, which most industry communities now organize
- If you have a booth, actively engage attendees rather than waiting for them to approach you. Offer something tangible: high score boards, stickers, mailing list sign-ups, Discord invites, small competitions
- Quantify your financial and time investment in the event so you can honestly assess afterward whether it produced a return
Guy was also candid about the toll these events take. The physical fatigue of being on your feet for eight to ten hours is real, but the mental fatigue of staying engaged and energetic the entire time is often worse. His advice is to plan recovery time after an event rather than scheduling something demanding immediately afterward.
The Part of This Work That Makes It Worth Doing:
Guy described stepping away from organizing events for a period last year due to burnout, and what brought meaning back to the work was not large attendance numbers but small, specific moments. A child playing Duck Hunt decades after the game’s release. A parent matching their child’s excitement at a booth. A developer hearing that someone found a publisher, a job, or funding because of a connection made through a community event.
Jay shared a similar experience: a woman who approached him at a recent event in Edmonton to tell him that the Indie Game Business publisher list had directly led to two of her clients landing publishing deals. Moments like that are part of why both Guy and Jay continue doing this work despite the cynicism that comes with years in the industry.
Where to Find Guy Blomberg and Upcoming Events:
Guy is currently focused on the Gaming Community Expo, GCX, taking place in Orlando, Florida, set within Universal Studios. The event was originally founded by content creators and has a strong community and creator orientation, with roughly half of attendees identifying as professional content creators. This year marks the first time GCX is offering industry badges, an industry mixer, a VIP lounge, and MeetToMatch integration specifically aimed at giving the event a genuine business development purpose alongside its consumer roots.
Want more insights like this?:
Join us for our IndieGameBusiness Sessions, taking place on September 30th from 9am – 5pm Eastern or hop into the IndieGameBusiness® Discord to connect with Guy and other industry pros.
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