What did you think of the GDC/Steam Festival event?

[Dinokaiser]

Hello! This is my first post on the forum, hi. Since no one is talking about it I am very curious what people actually thought of the GDC/Steam festival event (I'll open a seperate thread about the actual games themselves as I have a lot to say about em). I thought the idea was a brilliant one and a fantastic way of getting attention to indies who sorely need it, I am not sure how much this helped indie devs considering GDC is as much about gamedevs networking and I haven't heard anything if this helped with that. I think the event was also a tad bit underpromoted, the entire time the event was going on it was the Ubisoft sale that occupied the top banner and as the festival went on it was more hidden away, which is a bit of a shame.
Personally i'm of the opinion that since we're headed to online conferences/events anyway for major game announcements, I think offering demos is a fantastic way to get the general audience excited, I know i'm more excited then before for games I hadn't even heard of before. If game devs are worried about datamining then I suppose game streaming could be an option (though with bandwidth issues going on worldwide that's either unlikely or will be very limited) but it would probably be a method AAA publishers would be okay with.
So basically: What did you all think of the event?

 

[Zloth]

Well, I saw one demo that I was somewhat interested in but I soon forgot about it in favor of continuing the games I was already playing.

 

[nuclearmonk]

Did not watch. Any links?

 

[Synack]

I actually thought it was interesting.
I poked around in a few of the "rooms" that we're setup for each new game coming out. I thought it had like a 'booth' type feel to it. Although in the future it might help to figure out exactly how many viewers are actually active in the room. I also felt that depending on the person giving the demo they either we're timid or out there.

But I applaud them for trying something different.

E3 should have done something. In this day of technology there really is no excuse. It's a huge step backwards when in the 21st century something as simple as a virus puts a halt on things. Doctors are able to perform surgeries remotely for crying out loud. Anything short of doing something virtually is an excuse, and a poor one. We have time now to plan out 6-18mo. Things should have been planned 2-3 months ago for the rest of the year as a contingency.