Rob Pardo Urges GDC Leaders to Protect Dev Teams Behind Hit Games

On Thursday, March 12, 2026, Rob Pardo took the GDC Main Stage in North Hall in San Francisco for a keynote titled “An Odyssey in Building Games That Last,” delivering a talk that moved from his early career through Blizzard projects, Bonfire Studios’ work on Arkheron, and a closing appeal to executives about layoffs.

The session began at 9:00 a.m. PT and was live-streamed on the official GDC Festival of Gaming Twitch channel during GDC’s March 9–13, 2026 run.

When he began speaking, Pardo introduced himself to the audience and explained why returning to the conference held personal meaning.

“Good morning, GDC. It’s probably been a late night for everyone. I’m Rob Pardo, CEO of Bonfire Studios, and it’s actually great to be back on stage at GDC. GDC has always been to me such a special community because it’s where game developers share openly how we make games so we can all be better.”

He said his goal during the talk was to share experiences from his career working on games that continued to attract players long after release.

“What I’m hoping to do today is just to share a true things that I have learned over the years trying to build games that endure and last.”

Pardo’s career in the games industry stretches back decades. He began working in game development at Interplay Productions in 1994 as a game tester, and he considers his development career to have begun when he joined Blizzard Entertainment in 1997 to work on the original StarCraft. Over the following years he worked in creative leadership roles on several Blizzard projects before leaving the company in 2014.

Across that period, he worked on different genres, including real-time strategy games, MMORPGs, and a battler, first as a designer and later as an executive producer who helped lead design teams and projects. His work contributed to titles such as StarCraft: Brood War, Warcraft III, StarCraft II, World of Warcraft, and Diablo, and he eventually served as Chief Creative Officer at Blizzard. His influence in the industry led to him being named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2006.

Pardo later co-founded Bonfire Studios in 2016, where he now serves as co-founder and CEO. The studio is currently developing Arkheron, a team-based competitive PvP game. During the keynote, he explained that his team recently ran a playtest and hopes to launch later this year.

“I’m currently launching a new game with my team at Bonfire called Arcuron. We just ran a play test and hoping to launch later this year. It’s exciting, and it’s stressful. And honestly, it’s been a little humbling.”

Pardo described the development of Arkheron as a long process filled with difficult challenges, comparing the experience to a long journey. He explained that the project coincides with an internal milestone for the studio.

“This year is actually going to be the ten-year anniversary of Bonfire… the journey of building Arcuron has had odyssey moments of its own. Harrowing adventures, difficult navigation challenges, a lot of teamwork, and more than a few moments where we weren’t sure if the ship would survive the trip.”

Although the studio has spent years developing the game, Pardo explained that his career began long before Bonfire.

“I have been making games for a long time now.”

During his talk, he revisited experiences from projects across his career. He explained that even when developers create successful games, the path to those results often includes failed ideas, setbacks, and course corrections that players never see.

“Great games are very intuitive to play, and they are very simple, and really all of the mistakes, the learning, and the north stars that led the team to the final product are long buried.”

He said that nearly every project he has worked on involved moments where the team had to rethink what they were building.

“Every project that I have worked on has had a lot of setbacks too. There has been pivots. There has been deadends, and there has been moments where things weren’t working. And it’s often felt like we had to build the game three different times before we got to the right one.”

One example he shared involved Warcraft III, which Blizzard first announced in 1999. The initial concept differed greatly from the final version that shipped. The development team attempted to move beyond the traditional real-time strategy structure used in StarCraft by introducing a new genre concept they described as role-playing strategy.

During development the team placed greater focus on heroes while reducing the importance of resource collection. After working on the project for a long time, the team realized the approach was not working and had to change direction.

Although the original concept was abandoned, several ideas from the early design remained. The focus on heroes, leveling, and items eventually became defining features of the final Warcraft III experience.

Pardo explained that experiences like these taught him that difficult periods in development often lead to important discoveries.

“These blowups, the struggles, the pivots, they are really just part of the creative discovery process.”

He also described a project that never shipped but still influenced future work at Blizzard. During his time at the company, he led development on a large project known internally as Titan. Pardo said the team pursued ambitious goals across several areas at once, including creating new intellectual property, building new gameplay systems, and designing a new world.

Eventually, he made the decision to cancel the project. After the cancellation, a smaller group from the team continued experimenting with parts of the technology and design ideas created during development. That work eventually became Overwatch.

Later in the keynote, Pardo discussed the importance of development teams becoming deeply engaged with the games they are creating. He described a moment that often appears during development when the team begins spending more time playing the game than building it.

He said that when that happens, developers sometimes have to remind the team to return to work.

“There is this point in the development process… where the team starts extending play tests, and they end up loving playing the game almost more than making the game itself.”

According to Pardo, that moment often signals that the game has reached a point where the experience has become compelling even in its unfinished state.

The development process behind Arkheron followed many of the same patterns he had seen in earlier projects. At Bonfire, the studio began by focusing on building the team before settling on the game concept. Team members pitched dozens of early ideas, which the studio referred to as “seeds.” The studio eventually created 35 different seeds, ranging from a vampire survival game to a concept inspired by the film Gladiator in which Maximus returns as a farmer defending his land from zombies.

After narrowing those ideas down, the team eventually selected a concept known internally as Dungeon Royale, which evolved into a prototype called Cult before becoming Arkheron.

The current version of the game features 15 teams of three players entering a mysterious tower. Teams must survive each floor and capture a beacon, which usually requires defeating other teams in PvP encounters. The process continues until two teams reach the top, where they face each other in a final 3-versus-3 showdown.

Players control characters known as Echoes, souls tied to an afterlife tower by unfinished business. Weapons and relics inside the tower come from memories tied to characters known as Eternals, and collecting a full set of Eternal items can temporarily transform a player into that hero.

Pardo explained that the studio spent years prototyping the game’s core systems before arriving at the current design, including several changes to camera perspective, combat mechanics, and network architecture.

Near the end of the keynote, Pardo addressed the present conditions facing the games industry. He spoke about increasing development costs, the competition among hundreds of games for player attention, and layoffs impacting many developers. He then turned directly to executives and business leaders in the audience.

“If you actually create a game that truly endures, it’s really incredibly difficult, and if you are fortunate enough to launch one of those games, the rewards can be extraordinary.”

He said that achieving that level of success usually means the development team has overcome difficult challenges together.

“But in my experience, if you build a game like that, it also means that you have built an incredible development team, and personally I think the game team is more valuable than the game itself.”

He ended his speech with a final message directed at companies deciding how to treat the teams behind successful projects.

“So treasure that team, nurture that team, give them the autonomy to keep taking care of the players because the thing that made the game special in the first place was the people who built it.”