GDC Next and ADC follow games and apps into the future

The Game Developers Next and App Developers Conference are taking Los Angeles by storm pretty soon. We caught up with Patrick Miller to talk about the most interesting sessions coming up at the events, which focus on the future of the game industry and the nuts-and-bolts of developing apps.

The event takes place on Nov. 5 to 7, shortly after our own GamesBeat 2013 event on Oct. 29-30 in Redwood City, Calif. Miller, the GDC director of online community, said in an interview with GamesBeat that the ADC will be much like the Game Developers Conference, only with a special focus on making apps. It is co-located with GDC Next at the Los Angeles convention center. Both events are expected to draw about 4,000 people.

“ADC is our attempt to take the method of GDC in bringing developers together and sharing best practices,” said Miller, former editor of Game Developer magazine.  “There is more cross-pollination than we initially anticipated. We’re seeing an exchange both ways.”

GDC Next is the spiritual successor to GDC Online, which was held until this year in Austin, Texas. GDC Online focused on massively multiplayer games, free-to-play, mobile, and online titles. The shift to LA will give the show proximity to the area’s emerging tech scene and entertainment industry. ADC Next, meanwhile, is a brand new event focused on the very best programming, architecture, UI, marketing, and business of apps outside of games.

Speakers for ADC include notables from Dropbox, Evernote, Netflix, Pandora, Tumblr, and others. GDC Next is also a brand new event aimed at creating the game experiences of the future, with speakers from Disney Imagineering, NBC Universal, and Google.

In a survey, 26 percent of developers said that their mobile apps had been hit with piracy, Miller said.

Miller said that game developers have learned a lot of lessons about how to make their apps popular and monetize them. They can offer those lessons, like how to make second-screen apps, to the makers of non-game apps. Among the problems both app and game devs share in common: getting their content discovered amid a sea of other titles.

Adam Orth, a former technical manager at Microsoft, will give a talk about how he misspoke over Twitter and brought down a storm of abuse that wound up costing him his job. He’ll talk on the destructive power of opinion in the online community.

Here’s ten of the cool sessions at GDC Next:

1.Super TIME Force – From Game Jam to Full Game – Super TIME Force & Other Shining Examples (Nathan Vella | Capy Games)
2.Supernauts – Graphics Technology Challenges and Innovations for iOS in Supernauts (Harri Hatinen | Grand Cru)
3.Doki-Doki Universe – Doki-Doki Universe: Sweet, Simple and Genuine (Greg Johnson | HumaNature Studios)
4.Project Spark – Project Spark: Enabling and Inspiring the User to Make (Almost) Anything (Soren Hannibal | (Team Dakota/Microsoft)
5.Wayward Manor – An Odd Collaboration: How Neil Gaiman and The Odd Gentlemen Decided to Make Wayward Manor Together (Matt Korba | The Odd Gentlemen)
6.Broken Age – Rethinking a Classic Genre for the Modern Era (Oliver Franzke, Lee Petty, Greg Rice & Tim Schafer | Double Fine Productions)
7.CounterSpy – How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Making CounterSpy (David Nottingham | Dynamighty)
8.D4 – Dawn of the Dreaming Director’s Drama (Hidetaka ‘SWERY’ Suehiro Access Games)
9.Project Eternity – Gathering Your Party with Project Eternity (Josh Sawyer, Obsidian Entertainment )
10.Storyteller – Using Plot Devices to Create Gameplay in Storyteller (Daniel Benmergui, Ludomancy)