"I Do Not Feel Safe": How US Immigration Crackdowns Are Driving International Game Developers Away From GDC

For nearly four decades, the Game Developers Conference has served as the global heartbeat of the video game industry — a place where an indie studio from New Zealand could pitch to publishers from Tokyo, where a freelance sound designer from Quebec could network with executives from London, where the boundaries between nations dissolved in service of a shared creative medium. That era may be ending.

As GDC 2026 — freshly rebranded as the "GDC Festival of Gaming" — prepares to open its doors at San Francisco's Moscone Center this week, a growing chorus of international developers has announced they will not be walking through them. Their reason is stark and consistent: the United States no longer feels safe [1][2].

The Scale of the Exodus

The numbers tell a story that conference organizers have struggled to downplay. A GDC survey of 2,300 industry professionals found that 31% of international developers have cancelled their US travel plans, while another 33% are actively considering cancellation [3]. Among LGBTQ+ industry workers, the withdrawal rate is even higher: 47% have pulled out entirely [3]. Perhaps most consequentially for the business side of the industry, 60% of international leaders and investors reported that current US immigration policies have impacted their ability or desire to do business with American companies [3].

These are not fringe voices. Emilio Coppola, Executive Director of the Godot Foundation — the organization behind one of the most widely used open-source game engines in the world — put it bluntly from his base in Spain: "I honestly don't know anyone who is not from the US who is planning on going to the next GDC. We never felt super safe, but now we are not willing to risk it" [1][4].

GDC typically draws around 30,000 registered attendees, with approximately 30% — or 9,000 people — coming from outside the United States, according to GDC Executive Director Mark DeLoura [5]. Organizers have insisted that attendance is "tracking in line with expectations" and that they have not observed significant cancellations [6]. But that claim sits uneasily against the tide of public withdrawals from studios, individual developers, and industry organizations across Europe, Canada, Australia, and beyond.

Source: GDC / GlobeNewsWire / GamesBeat

Data as of Mar 10, 2026CSV

What Changed

The fears driving the exodus are not abstract. They are rooted in a cascade of policy changes and enforcement actions that have made the United States measurably more hostile terrain for international travelers since President Trump's return to office in January 2025.

Border Detentions and Enforcement Actions

The most visceral fears stem from high-profile incidents at US borders. In January 2026, the Department of Homeland Security launched what it called the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out, deploying 2,000 agents to the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area in "Operation Metro Surge" [7]. The operation led to the fatal shooting of Renée Nicole Macklin Good, a 37-year-old American woman, by ICE agent Jonathan Ross on January 7, 2026 [7]. Less than two weeks later, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and US citizen, was also fatally shot by Border Patrol agents [7]. US citizens — including Aliya Rahman, a Bangladeshi American, and Mubashir Khalif Hussen, a Somali American — were detained and physically restrained despite presenting proof of citizenship [8].

For game developers watching from abroad, these incidents confirmed their worst fears. As Dutch-Egyptian developer and industry advisor Rami Ismail put it: "Unless you're white and fit Trump's ideal — or pass as such — you have reasons for rejection" [3].

The Passport Problem for Transgender Developers

Executive Order 14168, signed on January 20, 2025, requires federal agencies to recognize gender as an immutable male-female binary determined at birth [9]. The State Department subsequently stopped issuing passports with "X" gender markers and now only issues passports matching a person's sex assigned at birth [9]. The Supreme Court upheld this policy in November 2025 in Orr v. Trump [10].

For transgender developers, this creates an impossible calculus. Vee Pendergast, a transgender woman from Perth, Australia, who works with the New Zealand Centre of Digital Excellence, captured the dilemma: "I do not feel safe in the country" [3]. Another transgender developer identified only as "Cassandra," a European indie studio co-founder and past IGF award winner, expressed deep concern about being required to carry documents that effectively out her at every checkpoint [3].

Social Media Scrutiny and Political Speech

The Department of State announced in December 2025 that consulates would expand screening of the online presence of H-1B and H-4 visa applicants [11]. The Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA), used by travelers from visa-waiver countries, now incorporates social media review. Reports of a French scientist being denied entry for having phone messages critical of Trump [2] sent shockwaves through the developer community, where political expression on platforms like X, Bluesky, and Mastodon is common.

French-Lebanese developer Nazih Fares now worries about arrest over his political views [4]. Chantal Ryan, who runs indie studio We Have Always Lived In The Forest from Adelaide, Australia, had previously been detained through racial profiling and is concerned that her public opposition to Trump could trigger social media scrutiny at the border [3].

The Spreadsheet

In the weeks leading up to GDC 2025, Rami Ismail received a message from an openly pro-Palestinian developer living outside the United States who was "more and more uncomfortable about going" to the conference [12]. Ismail offered to help by collecting the developer's travel details — flight information, hotel name, emergency contacts — so he could "help coordinate if something goes wrong" [12].

That offer to help one person quickly became a spreadsheet of dozens of international developers sharing their travel details as a safety net [12]. By the time people started getting detained at the border in early 2025, Ismail's assessment was unequivocal: "Under Trump, it's unacceptably dangerous to even enter the country for most" [12]. By 2026, his advice to international attendees had hardened further: "Cancel. Genuinely. Cancel" [3].

An Industry Already Under Strain

The GDC safety crisis is unfolding against a backdrop of severe economic pain in the video game industry. Between 2022 and mid-2025, an estimated 45,000 jobs were lost across the global games sector [13]. A crowd-sourced tracker recorded 8,500 layoffs in 2022, 10,500 in 2023, and 14,600 in 2024 — with the first quarter of 2024 alone accounting for 8,619 lost positions, the worst quarterly figure in gaming history [13]. According to GDC's own 2026 State of the Game Industry Report, 33% of US games industry workers reported being laid off in the previous two years [14].

Source: Wikipedia / Game Developer / Crowd-sourced layoff tracker

Data as of Mar 10, 2026CSV

Major studios — including Microsoft Gaming, Electronic Arts, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Epic Games, Ubisoft, and Riot Games — have all conducted significant layoffs [13]. For many international developers, especially those at smaller studios, attending GDC was already becoming a difficult financial proposition before safety concerns entered the picture. The conference's rebranding and introduction of cheaper pass tiers (the new Festival Pass starts at $649, roughly half the former All-Access price) [15] may help on cost, but cannot address the fundamental question of whether it is safe to enter the country.

The Response — and Its Limits

GDC president Nina Brown has stated that "safety of our community is always our top priority," noting that the event offers a 24/7 safety hotline, safety training for event staff, and security escorts upon request [1]. The conference has also provided letters that attendees can include in visa applications and customs paperwork [2].

But these measures address conference-floor safety, not the border. No escort service or hotline can prevent a customs agent from searching a phone, questioning political views, or denying entry based on a passport gender marker. As Paul Dean, a UK-born games writer based in Vancouver who was once held at the US border for eight hours, observed, the safety risks begin long before anyone reaches Moscone Center [3].

Where the Industry Goes Instead

The withdrawal from GDC is accelerating a trend that was already underway: the decentralization of the global games industry away from US-centric events. European conferences like Gamescom and its associated developer event Devcom in Cologne, Develop:Brighton in the UK, Digital Dragons in Krakow, and Nordic Game in Malmö are positioning themselves as alternatives where international developers can network without the immigration anxiety [16]. The Godot Foundation, for its part, is running its own GodotCon event in Amsterdam [17].

For some developers, the shift is permanent. Harold, a Canadian developer and studio founder who renounced his US citizenship, noted that Canadians have been detained by DHS without due process [3]. Zane, a European games analyst and consultant, reported discriminatory encounters "every time I've been to the States in the past year" [3].

The Bigger Picture: Tech's American Problem

The games industry is not alone in this reckoning. In December 2025, Apple and Google reportedly warned employees on visas to avoid international travel amid the immigration crackdown [18]. The State Department announced that most visa categories would no longer be eligible for interview waivers starting September 2025, and the Trump administration proposed an annual fee of $100,000 per H-1B application [11]. Chinese tech workers invited to CES in Las Vegas reported unusually high rates of US visa denials [11].

The December 2025 travel ban, formally titled "Restriction on Entry of Certain Nonimmigrant Workers," and expanded social media vetting have created what immigration attorneys describe as a climate of profound uncertainty [11][19]. Tech researchers have filed lawsuits against the administration over visa bans [20].

For the game developers watching from studios in Berlin, Melbourne, Montreal, and Stockholm, the message has been received clearly. The United States built the world's dominant game development conference by being the place where the global industry came together. Whether it can sustain that position while making a significant portion of the global industry feel unwelcome is the question that GDC 2026 — and every US-based tech conference after it — now faces.

The 30,000-person conference may still fill its halls this year. But the composition of those halls — and the conversations that do not happen because the people who would have had them stayed home — will define what GDC becomes in the years ahead.