Every February, the people who actually make the decisions in this industry gather in a Las Vegas ballroom and try to figure out where the whole thing is going. The DICE Summit has been doing this for over two decades now, and the 2026 edition, running February 10 to 12 at the Aria Resort & Casino, arrives with a theme that feels less like a slogan and more like a genuine open question: “Next Level.”
It is a fitting frame for an industry that spent the last two years tearing itself apart and is only now starting to rebuild.
Why “Next Level” Hits Different in 2026
DICE has always positioned itself as a forward-looking event, but this year’s theme carries weight that previous iterations could not claim. The games industry entering 2026 looks fundamentally different from the one that walked into the Aria in 2024. Tens of thousands of jobs were cut across major publishers and platform holders. Studios with decades of history were shuttered. The venture capital pipeline that fueled a generation of indie ambition dried up. And through all of it, the tools available to creators, from generative AI to increasingly powerful game engines to cloud-native development pipelines, kept accelerating at a pace that outstripped the industry’s ability to have a coherent conversation about how to use them.
That gap between capability and direction is exactly what DICE is built to address. This is not a trade show floor. There are no booth demos or consumer-facing spectacles. The Summit is an intimate, invitation-driven gathering of studio heads, creative directors, platform executives, and the kind of behind-the-scenes decision-makers whose names rarely trend on social media but whose choices shape what millions of players experience. The programming is built around talks, panels, and structured networking designed to surface the ideas that will define the next cycle of game development.
The addition of new programming formats this year suggests the organizers recognize that the standard keynote-and-panel model is not enough for the complexity of the current moment. When the official framing asks “what lies ahead for the world’s biggest entertainment art form,” the subtext is clear: nobody has the answer yet, and the point is to get the right people in the same room to start figuring it out.
The DICE Awards Still Set the Peer Standard
The Summit’s other major draw is the annual DICE Awards ceremony, which follows the three-day conference. In a landscape increasingly crowded with game awards shows, from The Game Awards’ mainstream spectacle to various outlet-specific honors, the DICE Awards occupy a distinct lane. These are peer-voted awards, chosen by members of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. The people casting ballots are the same people who build the games being nominated.
That peer credibility matters. A DICE Award for Outstanding Achievement in Game Design carries a different kind of weight than a fan-voted trophy, not because one is more valid than the other, but because they measure different things. DICE recognition signals respect within the craft itself, and for studios navigating a brutal funding environment, that signal can translate into tangible leverage in publisher and investor conversations.
The 2026 ceremony will be worth watching closely for what it chooses to celebrate. After a year defined by both blockbuster sequels and scrappy independent releases that punched well above their budget class, the nominations will tell us something about which creative bets the industry’s own practitioners believe paid off.
What Makes DICE Worth the Trip
| Detail | Info |
|---|---|
| Dates | February 10 to 12, 2026 |
| Location | Aria Resort & Casino, Las Vegas |
| Format | Onsite, B2B, invitation-driven |
| Highlight | DICE Awards ceremony |
| Registration | dicesummit.org |
The value proposition of DICE has never been about content volume. GDC delivers more sessions. Gamescom delivers more spectacle. What DICE delivers is density of influence in a setting small enough that you can actually have a real conversation with the person sitting next to you at lunch. For senior professionals, that access is the product.
It also helps that the Summit shares the same Las Vegas window and venue with MeetToMatch’s Las Vegas Edition, creating a week where an unusually high concentration of industry decision-makers are within walking distance of each other. For anyone making the trip, the combined gravity of both events turns three days into an opportunity that is hard to replicate anywhere else on the calendar outside of San Francisco in March.
Reading the Room at the Aria
The games industry has a habit of using its biggest stages to project confidence even when the ground underneath is shaking. DICE, at its best, skips the projection and gets to the substance. The “Next Level” theme is an open invitation to talk honestly about what comes after the contraction, what new tools actually mean for creative teams, and how the business models sustaining this medium need to evolve.
The real question is whether the conversations at the Aria this February will match the ambition of that framing, or whether the industry is still too cautious to say out loud what everyone in the room already knows?
