The Witcher IV, Minecraft, and Disney Imagineering headline GIC 2026’s record Poznań lineup

There is a particular kind of conference where the rooms themselves feel like an argument. When the designer working on The Witcher IV sits in the same hall as the systems lead who shaped Minecraft, and both can listen to a rendering engineer whose last project was Marvel‘s Spider-Man 2, the gathering stops being a professional calendar entry and starts to feel like a cross-section of where the craft actually lives. Game Industry Conference 2026, set for 21–24 October at MTP Poznań, is building toward that kind of density.

Nearly 100 sessions have already been confirmed — and the organisers are clear that this represents less than half the full programme. That makes the 2026 edition the largest GIC in Poznań’s history, a significant claim for a conference that already occupies a specific position in the European gamedev calendar: GIC runs alongside Poznań Game Arena, an expo that draws over 68,000 visitors and 180-plus exhibitors to the same fairground complex east of Cologne.

The announced roster reads like a tour of the decade’s most consequential development rooms. Jakub Kapuściński-Bernatek brings The Witcher IV to the stage — currently a Senior Gameplay Designer at CD PROJEKT RED and previously on Outriders: Worldslayer at People Can Fly. Nickole Li, a Principal Systems Designer at Mojang with credits spanning Minecraft, Battlefield, and Ghost Recon, joins him. Megan Friedenberg, a rendering engineer at Walt Disney Imagineering who contributed to Insomniac’s Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, rounds out what may be the most technically varied speaker list GIC has assembled. Stéphane Jankowski adds the producer’s vantage — twenty-one years steering the Anno franchise at Ubisoft Mainz, with Anno 117: Pax Romana and Anno 1800 among his credits. David King brings seventeen years of Electronic Arts institutional knowledge across Battlefield, Need for Speed, and Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst.

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Eight specialised summits structure the week. The new arrival worth tracking is the AI Beyond Gaming Summit, which explicitly moves past theoretical AGI to stake out a data-driven, six-year outlook on AI in game production: narrative agents, production-ready tools, and the medium’s broader cultural consequence. Alongside it run tracks for marketing, international legal and regulatory affairs, audio production, multiplayer game development, and the GEEK Investment Forum — a direct bridge between developers and investors in the European market.

GIC continues its Women in Games Day, running since 2020, and expands a dedicated men’s mental health track that launched in 2025 and drew consistent participation across five sessions in its first year. That the industry would give structured conference time to that subject — roundtables, workshops, talks — is itself a shift worth noting.

Game Industry Conference 2026 runs from 21 to 24 October in Poznań, Poland. Tickets are available at gic.gd.

Tags: CD PROJEKT RED, game development conferences, Game Industry Conference, GIC 2026, Mojang, Poznań

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