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Summer Game Fest 2025 is just a month away, and the team behind the Day of the Devs portion of the Los Angeles-based gaming convention is hard at work on this year’s lineup.
Created by Double Fine Productions and iam8bit, the Day of the Devs in-person events are described by iam8bit co-owner Jon M. Gibson as “a reaction to us working convention for so long and the opportunity to make something new.”
“To rethink what it is to go to a hands-on event,” Gibson told Variety in an interview at the Game Developers Conference in March. “It doesn’t have to be weird, stale, cold brutalist convention center. It can be it can feel more like a mini South by Southwest festival vibe with comfortable furniture and great food. If you’re on a comfy couch and sipping a margarita or water or whatever, you just get more content out of it. The developers and publishers feel better too, because no one’s so guarded. There’s still secrets, of course. And it was hard for us to explain it to people the first year, and then everyone saw the results.”
Day of the Devs saw its in-person efforts thwarted during the COVID-19 pandemic that impacted all live events and put heavy emphasis on its digital showcases over the past few years. But after a good turnout at last year’s Summer Game Fest and this year’s San Francisco-based GDC, the team is optimistic about the future.
“We feel heartened too, because we definitely saw dips in attendance for physical events post-COVID, particularly Day of the Devs immediately post-pandemic, when we first started bringing things back,” iam8bit co-owner Amanda White said. “But this year, here in San Francisco midway through GDC, we’re right back up to pre-pandemic attendance levels. There’s just so much enthusiasm and it’s a very good indicator for the way things are going to go.”
A self-described “creative production emporium,” the LA-based iam8bit was founded by White and Gibson in 2005. As it celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, the company that began as an art show and has evolved into financing and publishing games under its iam8bit Presents imprint (including the upcoming slice-of-life RPG “Petal Runner,” which will be showcased out of SGF) has a purposeful strategy amid the headwinds facing the gaming indsutry.
“We’re in this very rare position where there’s no investors, there’s no giant corporation above us, so we make the decisions,” Gibson said. “We’re able to be really reactionary to whatever’s going on, which is one of our secret weapons. So looking forward here. we can imagine that our publishing slate will have more games on it. We can imagine that we’ll probably hire a few more people and have a larger presence out there. The reality is it’s very wide open.”
English (US) ·