Creating an enduring game that players love is the ambition for many of us in the games industry. In recent years, some business leaders have even formalized that ambition under the banner of the “Forever Game.”

Rob Pardo has spent his career shaping games like StarCraft, World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, among others, where the goal was simpler: build games that felt deep, fun, and worth playing again tomorrow. Looking back, a pattern emerged. Every game that shipped reached a moment when the team fell so deeply in love with the core experience that they had to be told to stop playing and get back to work. Every game that was canceled never reached that point. That moment cannot be scheduled or mandated. It must be discovered.

At Bonfire, the team has spent the past decade on its own odyssey building Arkheron. As any game developer knows, the path is rarely a straight line. It is marked by pivots, false starts, and moments of epiphany that only emerge through iteration.

In this keynote, Rob will share what he has learned about building games with the potential to last - why playing the game to build the game is essential, how to cultivate a team that’s obsessed with creating an experience players genuinely love, and why that obsession must be paired with the humility to let players decide if it deserves to last. With Arkheron, the team were the first players and co-creators, and they are now widening that circle to build alongside their community. They do not know exactly where the road leads, but they know they have found the spark of something they cannot stop playing.

GDC Festival of Gaming

Rob Pardo, former Blizzard veteran and CEO of Bonfire Studios, delivers a GDC 2026 keynote reflecting on 25+ years of building enduring games. He shares lessons from Starcraft, Warcraft 3, World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, and the cancelled Project Titan. Key insights include: the importance of building the right team before pitching a game concept, finding the 'minimum lovable game' by prototyping core loops first, using daily playtests as a development ritual, and recognizing the milestone when a team falls in love with their own game. He also details Bonfire Studios' decade-long journey developing Archeron (formerly Colt/Dungeon Royale), a PvP dungeon-crawling extraction game. Pardo argues that 'forever games' cannot be engineered by formula — they emerge from authentic team passion, iterative discovery, and ultimately player adoption.

GDC 2026 Keynote - An Odyssey in Building Games That Last