Talking points from the Game Developers Conference 2025 and how they could impact the future of gaming

GDC 2025 is over. The stages have been cleared, the hotel rooms vacated, and the planes are full of bleary-eyed developers and journalists, sufficiently jet-lagged after travelling all the way to San Francisco. While the event has come to an end, the talks given will stay with us for the coming year, especially some of the biggest talking points.

5. AI

Love it or hate it, AI is the current industry hot topic. From Nvidia's DLSS frame generation squeezing extra juice out of your hardware to Microsoft Copilot giving you real-time tips for games like Minecraft and Overwatch 2, AI is taking many forms in games, some more helpful and wanted than others. A new AI-generated trailer for Ark absolutely bombed, and no one is willing to take responsibility for it.

Some developers are even experimenting with generative AI-powered NPCs. Ubisoft has launched Project NEO NPC, its internal team dedicated to making these NPCs more realistic. It could just hire writers to do that, but what do I know? CEO Yves Guillemot says to "expect a lot from gen AI in our games, to make our games more interesting and for people to really have a personalized experience." Whether we like it or not, there's going to be more AI in our games in the near-future, but how we respond to it could determine if it stays.

4. Open world fatigue

Games are simply too long and too big these days. We all have a limited number of hours in the day, but with live-service games demanding we do daily missions and single-player games lasting 100 hours or more, it's impossible to see everything, and it's hurting our ability to explore in games. Former GTA 6 and Red Dead Online developer Cameron Williams explains why it's so hard to get us to actually look around.

Williams explains a lot of us are dealing with "open world fatigue." There are only so many 100-hour open-world RPGs I can play before I need a 3-hour action-heavy chaser.

He also notes the problem of "analysis paralysis". If there are too many things to do, we often can't decide what to explore next and end up just doing nothing.

Maybe we'll see fewer open-world games, or more that are like Breath of the Wild and Elden Ring, offering a more hands-off approach and letting us discover the worlds at our own pace.

3. Don't listen to your boss (sometimes)

No one likes taking orders from their boss, but we all have to. That is, unless your name is Xalavier Nelson Jr. and you just want to prove your boss wrong. The head of indie studio Strange Scaffold, Nelson Jr. and his team have been making weird and wonderful games for years now, from Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator and Clickolding to I Am Your Beast and El Paso, Elsewhere, which is getting a movie adaptation. So, when he says he wants to make a match-3 game just to prove his publishers wrong, you can be sure that's what he's going to do.

Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 is a metroidvania match-3 game that looks absolutely absurd, but it's proof that you can make whatever game you want, no matter what the current industry trends are.

Helldivers 2 CEO Johan Pilestedt also got a telling off by PlayStation higher-ups after he told us all to wait to buy the game until the servers had settled down. It then "took five minutes until I got a call from the friendly people over at PlayStation asking what the f**k I was smoking. 'Don't recommend that people do not buy your games' - it's incredibly conventional wisdom." We like the no-nonsense attitude of Arrowhead and its developers though, so I think the community is glad he gave some honest advice instead of just telling us to buy the game anyways.

2. It's all about balance - or is it

Helldivers 2 exploded onto the scene last year and quickly became everyone's favorite co-op shooter. Its satirical take on fascism had us all roleplaying as good little Super Earth soldiers, and it's been getting constant updates. Not all of them have been well-received, though.

As a multiplayer game, balance is important. Or is it? "Balance is a myth. Fun first, balance later," says Helldivers 2 CEO Johan Pilestedt. "Game designers nowadays are obsessed with balance. Balance is 5% of the work that you should be doing. It's the polishing state of game design. If you start thinking about balance and using that as the method for success, you're an idiot." Strong words.

"Balancing is not game design," he continues. "Game design is about experience. If you balance out all the chaos, you've made an uninteresting game. Balance is the polishing of the object, and if you smoothen that out too much, it will just be a non-experience."

Sometimes, developer Arrowhead would nerf a weapon it thought was being used too frequently, or tone down a stratagem that was a bit too good at killing Terminids, but that's simply no fun. We love Helldivers 2 because it's fun to feel like a super soldier who can call down a school district's yearly budget's worth of high explosives onto a single enemy. Now, the updates seem more focused on making us feel more powerful, not less, and most of us are happier because of it.

I hope we see more weird and wonderful games and weapons that absolutely break the meta just because they're fun, rather than everything feeling the same in the name of fairness.

1. Diversity in the games industry is essential

There's been a sustained push against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the last year or so from a lot of loud, powerful people. It's strange, because women making up almost half of all gamers worldwide but only 23% of video game developers are women. Those figures get even smaller when considering non-binary and queer people.

Luckily, GDC 2025 had multiple talks about diversity in the industry, from the All In: Paving the Way for Female and Non-Binary Game Entrepreneurs talk and the Empowering All Genders: The Future of Inclusive Gaming roundtable. I like a sad dad video game as much as the next gamer, but variety is the spice of life, and I want to keep seeing more games made by people with different experiences to me so I can live out different lives and see the world through the eyes of as many fascinating characters as possible.