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Getting members of the media to cover your game is harder than ever, which is why organizers of the 2017 Game Developers Conference have lined up a great talk from a video game PR veteran about how to do just that.

ICO Partners' Thomas Reisenegger has done PR for games like League of Legends, Smite, Paladins, and Endless Space 2. In his GDC 2017 talk "Get Journalists to Cover Your Game: Lessons from Online Dating, Praying and 'No Man's Sky'" will deconstruct why why some games get more time in the spotlight while most struggle to get noticed.

What does good media coverage even look like and why do certain stories start spreading automatically? Reisenegger will show you, and share his own 5 "golden rules" on how to get your game covered.

The schedule for the 2017 Game Developers Conference is coming together nicely, and today organizers are excited to announce a useful talk that will help you prepare for launching for game on Steam's Early Access service.

Bohemia Interactive's Brian Hicks is creative director on the mega-popular DayZ, and in his GDC 2017 talk on "Early Access: Are You Prepared?" he plans to go over the top (and sometimes most painful) lessons learned from DayZ's transition through Early Access.

Covering everything from if Early Access is right for your project, avoiding mistakes that can impact development down the road, and leveraging the rewards players can offer in shaping a better experience, this talk promises to be packed with useful insights. Make time to check it out and you'll likely better understand the risks -- such as tech debt, managing consumer expectations, and the stresses of development while operating a live game -- and rewards of the Early Access development model.

As the year winds down around us, organizers of the 2017 Game Developers Conference would like to highlight an important panel taking place at the show next year that seeks to measure the impact 2016 had on the mobile game industry.

As part of the GDC 2017 Mobile Summit, experts Steve Meretzky (Vice President, Design, King), Dave Rohrl (Founder, Mobile Game Doctor) and Juan Gril (Founder + Studio Manager, Joju Games) will reflect on 2016 in a panel on "The Year in Mobile Games."

The latest in a long-running and popular series of talks, this session aims to offer a detailed look at the year's developments in mobile gaming. Panelists will dive into the most interesting games, the hottest trends, the most unusual new features, and the most surprising numbers. It's a great way to kick off your GDC, and to get up to speed on the current state of mobile games!

Organizers of the 2017 Game Developers Conference are lining up lots of great talks for the show, and among them is a really promising session from the folks at Butterscotch Shenanigans about how they achieved cross-platform success with their kooky game Crashlands.

In "Butterscotch Shenanigans: From Early Failures to Cross-Platform Success," studio cofounder Samuel Coster will walk through the four-year history of independent studio Butterscotch Shenanigans, providing an in-depth, occasionally funny, data-backed story for how a fledgling studio pivoted from failures and setbacks to ultimately become successful.

Over its first year in operation the studio launched a critically acclaimed financial failure, followed by a barely successful free-to-play title. With a modicum of success under the belt, the studio pivoted toward cross-platform development for mobile and PC, embarking on a 2-year dev cycle that culminated in the successful release of Crashlands in January of 2016.

Through 5 games and 5 million players the studio has faced the usual industry trials of discoverability, monetization, and retention, and has met each problem with failures and successes all its own. Come hear the story for yourself... and maybe avoid the mistakes this studio made!

Most of us are familiar with the experience of being entranced by a game; that feeling of total focus where the whole world melts away. So as a game designer, how do you create that feeling in your players?

You can find out at the 2017 Game Developers Conference next year, where game developer Robin Arnott (SoundSelf) will be delivering a great talk on "Designing a Trance: Meditation and Game Design" aimed at helping you understand the trance phenomenon.

By exploring the myriad causes and types of trance, the audience will better understand how to induce these states of mind. More profoundly, they can leverage trance itself as more than the bi-product of good game design, but as a tool for deepening a player's relationship with themselves and with others.

Arnott himself looks to meditation and music performance for game design inspiration, and if you attend his talk you'll likely walk away with a workable model of how game mechanics can (and do) lead to altered states of consciousness. Applied gently, the "trance model" can help make any game more immersive and entrancing. Taken to an extreme, though, it provides a road-map to creating the world's first digital psychedelics.

With the 2017 Game Developers Conference just months away, organizers are excited to announce another great talk taking place at the show: Naughty Dog's behind-the-scenes look at its new physics animation system for Uncharted 4: A Thief's End.

The game itself was a big hit this year, and at GDC 2017 Naughty Dog technical animator Michal Mach will reveal how its remarkable physics-driven animation systems came together in a talk on "Physics Animation in 'Uncharted 4: A Thief's End.'"

See, for Uncharted 4 Naughty Dog chose to take a risky step and experiment with adding a layer of physics simulation on top of their gameplay animation for added fluidity and momentum, with hopes that they could also save some production time by creating less assets and letting the physics "do the awesome."

Organizers of the 2017 Game Developers Conference, the largest event for game industry professionals in the world, are pleased to announce another remarkable talk taking place at the show about a very important topic: science.

Specifically, scientific data and learnings gleaned from citizen science projects integrated into CCP Games' MMO game EVE Online. The initiative, 'Project Discovery', was launched during GDC 2016. Next year, CCP's Bergur Finnbogason and MMOS Sarl chief Attila Szantner will share the results in a talk on "'Project Discovery': Lessons From Scientific Research via 'EVE Online'"

Project Discovery has since become one of the biggest citizen science efforts of 2016, generating over 14 million protein location classifications by EVE Online players. So come and hear about the story of the first year, the results and future plans for the project. You might just walk away inspired, with new perspective on how your own game can contribute to the advancement of science.