Opening Panel: Pass the Controller? Communities, Data, and AI in Game Development

Overview

Where do community feedback and data genuinely help a game, and when is it wiser to politely ignore them? The opening panel of JetBrains GameDev Day 2026 digs into that, and into what AI should and shouldn’t take off developers’ plates.

Behind every great game, dev tool and engine there’s a community. More and more, that community becomes part of the product itself. The panel looks at what community input and data are good for, where they mislead, and how teams decide what to act on.

The second thread is AI: how it can support people, especially juniors learning the fundamentals, without doing the thinking for them.

On the panel: voices from Discord, Boddle Learning, General Arcade, Sudden Forest and JetBrains. GameDev Day is a free online day of practical talks for people building games, engines, tools and production pipelines, and this panel opens it. Watch live online, or with the community at the watch parties in Belgrade and Limassol.