San Francisco, Jul 20 (IANS): As countries slowly open after 18 months of pandemic, the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) will return as an in-person event in March next year.

This year, a virtual version of the 35th edition of GDC kicked off on July 19.

"GDC 2022 will return as a physical conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco from March 21-25, 2022," the organisers said on Monday.

The GDC brings the game development community together to exchange ideas, solve problems, and shape the future of the industry across five days of education, inspiration, and networking.

The GDC Expo showcases the latest game development tools and services from leading technology companies such as Amazon, Epic, Google, Intel, Nvidia, Oculus, and Sony.

GDC 2021 features expert talks in diverse tracks of game development topics, such as design, business and marketing, visual arts and game narrative, classic games postmortems led by the developers of the classics, Quake and Star Wars Galaxy, opportunities for game career development and much more.

"We are thrilled to be launching the most robust virtual GDC event to date, which offers a huge amount of unique content from across the industry and benefits from our learnings from the past more than a year of digital GDC events," said Katie Stern who oversees the GDC as VP of Entertainment Media at Informa Tech.

"We also absolutely look forward to the return of GDC 2022 to San Francisco next year and for the opportunity to see this vibrant community together again in person," Stern said in a statement.