GDC Festival of Gaming 2026

Wednesday, March 11 | 2:50 PM – 3:20 PM | Blue Shield of California Theater, YBCA

Developers today face unprecedented choice when it comes to distribution. Multiple storefronts, platforms, and payment models create new opportunities, but also new challenges: How do you cut through the noise? Which platforms are worth your time? What payment and revenue models lead to real success?

Join Matthew Ball (CEO and Managing Partner, Epyllion) and Steven Allison (VP and GM, Epic Games Store) for an essential conversation about distribution strategies that drive success in today's fragmented market.

Matthew Ball will share key insights from his newly released "The State of Video Gaming in 2026" report, revealing the trends and data reshaping how games reach players. Steven Allison will discuss proven strategies from the Epic Games Store for maximizing reach, connectivity, and revenue for indie studio AAA publishers alike.

Whether you're launching your first title or your fiftieth, this session will equip you with actionable intelligence to thrive in today’s multi-platform, multi-store era.

Wednesday, March 11 | 2:30 PM – 2:50 PM | Player Engagement Stage, South Hall

Indie creativity starts with opportunity. Join us on the show floor for this Power Talk, where we’ll spotlight real student success stories: projects born in classrooms, community spaces, and university labs that grew into meaningful indie endeavours.

Through these examples, we’ll explore how Unreal Engine and Epic’s ecosystem help young creators turn early prototypes into promising careers—and how educational programs can ignite the next wave of indie innovation.

Wednesday, March 11 | 11:10 AM - 11:30 AM | Player Engagement Stage, South Hall

Developers have made over $900M in Fortnite since UEFN launched at GDC 2023. In this session, we’ll explore how the Fortnite ecosystem enables devs to build scalable businesses through two complementary revenue streams: In-Island Transactions and Engagement Payouts.

Learn how direct in-island transactions are enabling more advanced game economies, progression systems, and premium experiences at Fortnite’s massive global scale — with dev-friendly economics. We’ll spotlight real examples of developers building sustainable, high-quality experiences, walk through new Creator Portal features to grow your business, and share a high-level look at how the Fortnite economy will continue to reward innovation in 2026 and beyond.

Tuesday, March 10 | 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM | Room 3009, West Hall

Fortnite is more than a game—it’s an ecosystem where players come with different devices, inputs, and play styles, but share the same expectations for fun and quality.

In this session. we’ll explore what it means to design cross-platform games using Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN). We’ll look at how cross-platform development has traditionally fragmented design and workflows, and how UEFN reframes cross-platform not as a checkbox, but as a design philosophy baked into creation and publishing. Using examples shown across PC, console, and mobile, we’ll examine what stays consistent, what adapts, and why.

Dive deeper into UEFN tools—like profiling, world partitioning, modular design, and systemic gameplay—that support strong design judgment, faster iteration, and sustainable development.

Tuesday, March 10 | 2:00 PM - 2:30 PM | Room 2011, West Hall

Developing for mobile means battling finite resources. This talk will present a playbook for achieving maximum performance with your Unreal Engine mobile game. We’ll analyze how to efficiently manage CPU scheduling, GPU draw calls, and memory footprints. Join us to learn the profiling tools and specific tips needed to implement optimizations that radically improve both loading speed and real-time mobile gameplay.

Tuesday, March 10 | 10:10 AM – 11:10 AM | Room 3009, West Hall

What happens when your world has hundreds of different procedural elements that need to talk to each other? How do you build a large system that is both maintainable and fast, and also enables multiple artists to work on it collaboratively?

This talk by Senior Tools Programmer Adrien Logut and Principal Technical Artist Chris Murphy aims to cover some of the key concepts behind achieving this in large Unreal Engine projects.

Key topics include the procedural content generation (PCG) Biome Core; runtime vs static serialization; methodologies to avoid source control contention; key performance considerations; and finally, some tips and tricks to get the most out of PCG.

Monday, March 9 | 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM | Room 2011, West Hall

Mobile devices span a wide range of capabilities, from budget options to flagship models. How do you build a single Unreal Engine 5 project that runs well across this spectrum?

This talk covers the settings, features, and workflows needed to scale performance and quality across iOS and Android. We’ll explore device profiles and scalability systems; quality presets and console variable tuning; mobile-specific optimizations; and testing and profiling workflows to validate performance across devices. Learn how to configure your project to scale across the mobile ecosystem.

Monday, March 9th | 10:10 AM – 11:10 AM

Epic Games’ Matt Oztalay can talk about how to get your project running at your target frame rate until he’s hoarse. Wouldn’t it be better for you (and Matt’s vocal cords) if you started your project at your target frame rate and kept it that way?

In this session, we’ll take a journey through Unreal Engine 5’s development to see how Epic has been improving performance of the engine; discuss the tools you need to build your project at your target frame rate from the ground up; show you the features and tools you can use to monitor and diagnose your project’s performance; and explain how you can get back to frame rate if (when) you get off track.