Something sorta major is happening to the Game Developers Conference, and I'm not talking about the commercialism creep. No, starting next year the Game Developers Conference, now permanently ensconced in San Francisco, will be held in February.

This is due to a city of San Francisco/scheduling issue, rather than a we'd-like-to-meet-in-Feb. issue, but it's still going to become, I think, a big problem to that other conference held in February.

DICE, usually held in early February, can't, I imagine, co-exist so closely with the new, robust Game Developers Conference. In my mind, to use a really bad astronomy analogy, the Game Developers Conference is some huge planet and DICE is a moon that just got sucked into its gravitational pull. There's no way it's going to escape a collision and I think we all know who will win that smack-up.

I had a chance to speak a bit with Jamil Moledina, director of GDC, earlier this week about a lot of things, and I asked him what he thought the impact was going to be. He didn't really answer the question, but seemed to understand that it was going to be an issue for one or both conventions.

The problem, I think, is that the two are now so close together that companies and people who work in the business won't be able to swing to the time to do two trips. More importantly, not enough time will have passed to be able to talk about two different things. What you will be left with, I fear, is people either repeating themselves or going to only one of them.

McWhertor suggests that perhaps DICE should turn into an event that is press free. Something where the top people in gaming can meet away from the public eye to network and talk about overthrowing virtual world governments. I hate to agree, but I think he's right. Brian Crecente