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SIGGRAPH 2026 Introduces the Games Summit, a New One-Day Home for Game DevelopersThe 53rd annual conference debuts a curated day of games programming on Sunday, 19 July, spanning accessibility, audio, performance capture, and the economics of modern games development, with games content running all week LOS ANGELES, July 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- SIGGRAPH 2026, taking place 19–23 July 2026 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, will open with the Games Summit, a new one-day track dedicated to game developers and enthusiasts. Held on Sunday, 19 July, the Games Summit brings together leading studios and indies for a day of talks and networking focused on how games are made and where the medium is headed.
The Games Summit is a deliberate widening of the lens. Alongside the technical, real-time rendering-focused conversations SIGGRAPH is known for, it makes room for the broader questions facing game teams today. "SIGGRAPH is renowned for deep technical insights, and that isn't going anywhere. This year's games programming expands the scope with broader topics game developers are wrestling with right now," said Emily Hsu, SIGGRAPH 2026 Games Chair. She notes that SIGGRAPH is known as the world's premier conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, a category games squarely occupy. A Full Day, From Comfort to Cinematics The day opens with "Beyond the Dot: New Ways to Reduce Motion Sickness in Gaming", from Adrian Ledda, Magalie Rosseeuw, and Ewa Trusz with Activision, which reframes motion comfort as an accessibility issue affecting up to a third of players and embeds inclusive design directly into gameplay systems. A session on game audio follows, exploring how sound and music are layered into games. From there, the Battlefield 6 team at Electronic Arts presents "How We Brought the Franchise Vision to Life With Our Destruction System Debut", treating destruction as a tactical gameplay ecosystem rather than visual spectacle. A Computer Animation Festival Animation Theater session midday spotlights games and cinematics work, before "Performance Capture at Scale: Building a Pipeline for Battlefield 6 Cinematics", in which Pasha Sol from Electronic Arts details how EA Create Capture adapted film-grade virtual production to the pace and scale of AAA development. The Ecnomics of Building Games "It's not enough just to make great games. They also have to be economically sound," Hsu explained. "If you're trying to move faster and do it at a higher quality while still saving money, the only way is better tooling, better pipelines, and rethinking the technology behind it." Where Film and Games Meet The day's closing "The OpenUSD Roundtable: Using an Open Source File Format in Film and Game Dev Pipelines" makes that convergence literal, seating film and game developers at the same table to work through a file format that now moves across both pipelines, while "Performance Capture at Scale: Building a Pipeline for Battlefield 6 Cinematics" shows EA Create Capture carrying film-grade virtual production techniques onto a AAA game stage for Battlefield 6 cinematics. "We're already seeing game cinematic pipelines leaning heavily on filmmaking techniques, and film pipelines being built on game engines so the lines aren't blurred. They're gone," Hsu said. "What matters now is hybrid fluency in both. Those who have it can expand their toolkit and build the right pipeline for the project in front of them." Hsu continues, "That's the spirit of SIGGRAPH. There are no wins from hoarding information or existing in an an echo chamber of a single way of working. We advance across industries and as studios if we're actually sharing, cross-pollinating, and learning from each other." Games Content All Week For Hsu, the goal is straightforward. "My hope is that game devs leave Sunday's Games Summit feeling like they've already made great connections and experienced something worthwhile — and then realize the conference week is just getting started. The Games Summit stands on its own, but it is also part of a larger conference that brings together researchers, artists, and technologists who solve problems in ways that might surprise them. For those who can make the week of it, there's a lot more where that came from." The Games Summit is open to Full Conference, Full Conference Supporter, and Experience badge holders. Games content in other programs may carry different registration access, so attendees should check each program's page for details. Together, the Games Summit and games programming across the week demonstrate how SIGGRAPH continues to champion bold ideas in games while advancing the future of computer graphics and interactive techniques. To explore this year's conference and offerings, visit the website to see where games are headed, and register now to experience everything the Games Summit has to offer at SIGGRAPH 2026. About ACM, ACM SIGGRAPH, and SIGGRAPH 2026
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