The Fourth annual Game Developers Conference is right around the corner. It will be held at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, California from March 8th to March 12th. Unlike E3, which focuses on showing upcoming games to the press, the Game Developers Conference focuses more on the evolving world of game development and how companies, big or small, can use their resources more effectively. Because of the different focus, most developers do not tend to show off what they have, instead saving their surprises for E3. Hence, the press doesn't tend to get too excited due to the lack of huge announcements at the event.

This conference, however, will be quite different.

The day before the keynote speakers were announced, there was a rumor going around that Bill Gates himself would be a keynote speaker and would have the X-Box in hand. Less than twenty-four hours later, the speakers were announced, but Gates' name was not on the list. Slowly the hype died down, and most discarded the entire thing as a rumor that got entirely too much hype.

However, this morning they surprised us all, and Bill Gates was indeed confirmed to speak at the conference. He will be speaking from 10:30am to 11:30am on Friday, March 10th, almost exactly a week after the Japanese release of the Playstation 2. Whether he'll have the X-Box in hand or not has not been confirmed, and will most likely not be confirmed until he shows up with it. However, considering he probably isn't going to talk about Asheron's Call for an hour, it is an incredibly good possibility that the system will be revealed so that the developers in attendance can get a good idea of how to develop for it, or what they will need to do so their current PC games will play on the system.

When Bill Gates speaks on March 10th, RPGamer will be ready with all of the details. The Fourth annual Game Developers Conference is was already the most anticipated conference to date, and should Gates officially announce the X-Box like expected, the gaming world will never be the same.