5 tips for submitting a talk to the Game Developers Conference (GDC)
The core 5 things to consider are:
Do you have actionable takeaways?
Do you already have content that you can show?
Why would someone want to visit your talk?
Are you submitting for a Summit, or the Core Concepts sessions?
Does your submission have common issues?
I’m Robin-Yann Storm, a Tool UX & Workflow Designer, and I have been a speaker at GDC in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2023, and 2024. In that time I have held 5 talks and 9 roundtables. This year GDC also used my 2023 roundtable submission as a standout example in their FAQ. I am not an official GDC advisor, so I do not get to decide what submissions are accepted or rejected. But, I can tell you what I have noticed works well and does not work well over these 10 years of submitting GDC talks myself, and helping many others submit their talks.
If you would rather listen than read, you can also find a video version of this article at the bottom of this page.
1. Do you have actionable takeaways?
This is the number one thing that I have seen a submission get accepted or denied over. Takeaways can make or break your proposal. As much as I love seeing how my favourite level from a recent game was built, what you need in your proposal are strong takeaways about how it was built, and why it was built that way.
An easy way to think about it is this: Will attendees who see your presentation walk away with actionable things they can apply when they have travelled back to their studio? Will they know what actions to take, or to avoid, to get the results you had? You want to have attendees leave the talk thinking “Wow, that was useful and interesting, and we should do those things too, and now I know how!”
For example, if you were to do a talk about a particular level you have built, the idea is not to just present “Here is how we built it. These are the iterations we did. This is the end result.”, but instead to present “Here is how we built it, and why we built it that way. Here are the assumptions we had, and the iterations we had to do after user research. Here is the end result, which taught us that assumption X was wrong, and we should have done Y instead. You can find out if this is applicable to you by looking out for Z.” That last part is the actionable takeaway that you need.
What are your actionable takeaways, and can you write them down within 500 words? The GDC advisors also alludes to this themselves. I love that in all this time I have submitted talks, there has always been this little subsection of text on the submission form that reads: “Do not tease with something like, "My lecture will reveal amazing findings about how people play puzzle platformers," instead say, "We have found 90% of people only play puzzle platformers while eating pepperoni pizza," or whatever your amazing finding actually is.” If you do not have actionable takeaways, then your submission probably isn’t ready yet, and it needs more work before you submit it.
2. Do you already have content that you can show?
If you think you need more than 500 words to properly convey your idea, then you can add slides or documentation to your submission. Having slides ready when submitting, and not waiting until the last moment to make them, is another thing that I have seen help a submission get accepted. The slides do not have to look beautiful when submitting, and a few screenshots and bullet points are enough. Make sure the slides can be quickly skimmed and understood without a presenter present.
The same goes for roundtable submissions. You can include the questions you think will be asked at the roundtable. This indicates you have a general idea about what will be discussed, and what you will prepare for. It also gives the GDC advisors information they need to see whether that topic and those questions will be a good fit for the conference.
When submitting roundtable sessions myself in the past I have also added a Word document that included the timeline of the session. In that document I explained the first 5 minutes were for introductions and gathering questions, then we would talk about the questions for 40 minutes, then we would pick up any other topics for 10 minutes, and then 5 minutes of closing off the session. Even just showcasing that timeline, so that it looks like you know what you will do, what will happen, and how you will host the session in an organised way, is very useful. It puts the mind at ease about what the session is going to be, how you will handle it, and what you want to do in a room for 1 hour.
Slides and documentation are not required, but it makes it much easier to see if you are prepared to talk about your topic. It also makes it easier for GDC advisors to give feedback in Phase 2. Phase 2 is after the regular submission process. An advisor will be assigned to “mentor” your talk and will give you feedback to make sure your submission hits the quality bar of the conference.
3. Why would someone want to visit your talk?
Just because you care deeply about a topic does not mean everyone else does too. You have to figure out how to sell your topic to both the advisors and the eventual attendees. If a topic gets you really excited, then that is fantastic and you should pursue that drive, but can you make other folks care about this subject? Why would the attendees pick your talk over the other twenty that are happening at the same time during the conference? And, why would the advisors pick it? The Moscone Center is big, but it is not filled with infinite rooms, so why would they take your submission over someone else’s? It is a hard question to ask, but a necessary one for a good submission.
For example, the basics of game development are important, but specifically in the context of latest releases. In the submission form it also states: “Be specific by giving concrete examples and remember that GDC attendees are experts in their field.” The idea of GDC is that the attendees are experts in their field, seeing talks from other experts in their field. If you submit something like “Make sure your game is not scoped too big when you start building it, as you may run out of time or budget!” then you may very well be correct that this is actionable information that many studios still struggle with year after year. But at the same time it is also so basic that it’s hard to take it seriously at face value.
Instead, think about your target audience: These experts should know that scoping is important, yet the scoping issues keep cropping up, why? Answering that question with an example is a good way of doing that. For example, you may instead say: “In our latest release ‘Game X’, our scopes for level A and feature B were too big, and we had issues 1, 2, and 3 because of that. The reason our scopes were too big was because of Y and Z. Make sure to look out for those issues to avoid those problems.” Now you have touched on both the correct point, and also shown that it still happens, as well as clearly illustrated why it happens, how it happens, and how to avoid it.
The reason for doing this with latest releases is because if we were to say “We only need 2.39MB of space for a highly successful game, so all games should be better optimized!’ then it may be true that all games could be better optimized, but that 2.39MB figure from a highly successful game is from the original Doom released in 1993. So what you say may be true, but it is not an actionable takeaway that someone can apply right now.
4. Are you submitting for a Summit, or the Core Concepts sessions?
Make sure you understand what section of GDC you are submitting to. GDC has two different sections: Monday and Tuesday are the GDC Summits, Wednesday to Friday are the Core Concepts talks, and Friday hosts the Game Career Seminar. Core Concepts submissions can be any kind of topic, as long as you submit it for a particular track such as visual art, programming, design, and others.
Summits are a little bit different. In simple terms, each summit is a single room for a single day filled with talks only about one particular topic, such as AI, Graphics, Animation, Art Direction, Independent Games, Level Design, Machine Learning, Technical Art, Education, UX, and others.
Imagine a whole day of talks about Level Design at the Level Design Summit. There may be talks about recent games, and specific levels released for them. How to build better blockouts, or communicate blockout needs before they are built. How to teach level design to others, or how to build better VR levels. How to allow players to navigate spaces better, or how to better integrate level and quest design together. All of those can fit!
The Core Concepts submissions and the Summit submissions are also at different times in the year, so make sure you know when the submission window closes for each one.
5. Does your submission have common issues?
Lastly, always look out for the common issues that stop a submission in its tracks. These are:
The reason for giving your talk is that you want to sell a product.
There are specific sponsored sessions for this instead. Please take a look at the separate submission process for those.
You want to do your talk with two or more speakers.
This happens but is exceedingly rare. Other conferences may be more lenient to this, but in my experience GDC isn’t. If you need two speakers, you have to have a really big and very important reason for it. Instead, try and see if you can submit it as one person, or two separate sessions that can be accepted separately without interference between each other.
You have spoken at GDC before and received a low audience rating.
If this is the case then the task of getting a submission accepted has gotten much tougher. Check your emails for the audience reviews of the last time you spoke at GDC, and look at their feedback. The advisors can see those reviews too. Is there something you can do with that feedback?
You haven’t received approval from your studio to submit a talk.
I dislike this truth, but it is an inescapable reality: Not all companies allow you to submit a talk to GDC. Check with your manager on whether you are allowed to submit something first, to make sure that you do not get accepted and then have to get out of it at the last minute. I have heard of fantastic proposals being stopped at the last minute because they were pulled out by the company the speaker worked for.
Conclusion
And that’s it! Those are 5 things to look out for. In short:
Do you have actionable takeaways?
Can attendees walk away with information they can apply right away to their current projects?
Do you already have content that you can show?
If you cannot get your proposal into 500 words, is there something else you can submit that clarifies what you will talk about in a simple and fast way?
Why would someone want to visit your talk?
If you are interested in the topic, that’s great, but do you also know others will be interested in picking your talk over the twenty others they can pick instead? Be critical of what you submit.
Are you submitting for a Summit, or the Core Concepts sessions?
There are different tracks for different sessions, so make sure you know what kind of session you are submitting and what track you are submitting it to.
Does your submission have common issues?
Watch out for common issues, such as only talking to sell a product, trying to talk with two or more speakers, having a low audience rating from the past, and if you are allowed to submit the talk you want to give.
GDC initially asked me to write down my best tips for submitting a session at GDC. They published my writing over here, and I am thankful for them giving me the opportunity to help folks. Feel free to contact me at Twitter, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions.
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