POKI AT GDC

The Ask

Poki is one of the world's leading free-to-play gaming platforms. A brand built entirely around accessibility, creativity, and the idea that great games should be available to everyone. For GDC at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, the brief was to bring that identity onto the show floor in a way that felt genuinely inhabitable rather than just visually loud.

The 20x30 footprint needed to carry multiple simultaneous experiences without any of them feeling cramped or compromised:

A gaming corner for real-time product engagement and game testing
A hospitality zone with food service, coffee and espresso machinery, and bottle cooling
Dual banquette seating capsules for interactive screen viewing or informal meetings
Overhead signage visible above the GDC show floor from a significant distance

The aesthetic direction balanced sleek laminates, custom-painted accents, and a bold, playful brand palette that had to hold its own in a room full of gaming industry heavyweights.

The Solution

Show Ready fabricated a turnkey 20x30 custom trade show booth design for Poki at GDC — a structurally engineered, multi-zone environment built from the deck up and finished to a standard that matched Poki's platform identity at every scale.

Wall Systems and Meeting Room

Enclosed rooms were built using heavy-duty prefabricated insulated structural sandwich panels at 80 to 100 millimeters thick, finished in Formica Surf Matte Laminate and engineered to provide sound dampening — a meaningful specification in a convention hall running at full GDC volume. The private meeting room featured a custom wall-mounted cantilever tabletop with a single structural steel support leg, surfaced in Formica Graystone with custom Lemon Yellow and Red-Orange frame accents.

Banquette Seating

Two built-in banquette seating capsules were custom-fabricated from structural plywood shells wrapped in Formica Just Rose laminate, upholstered with heavy-duty high-density foam and custom-stitched Vescom Furka Plus performance fabrics in Turquoise, Yellow, and Pink. Dual 43-inch monitors anchored the outside banquette. Two 32-inch 1080p displays were built natively into the interior banquette structure for immersive screen viewing.

Signage

Three distinct signage elements gave Poki vertical presence above the show floor:

A 6-meter-high structural steel sign pole anchored below the raised flooring and secured to the main wall units, providing the structural backbone for the overhead signage program
A custom-engineered rotating electrical neon antenna sign mounted overhead — a kinetic brand moment visible from across the hall
A 2-meter by 3-meter double-faced painted metal pylon lightbox with internal LED illumination and precision milk-acrylic faces wrapped in brand vinyl graphics

AV and Digital Integration

The gaming corner ran 4K LED displays paired with a client-supplied Mac Mini concealed behind the mounting bracket. The meeting room featured a 55-inch 4K LED monitor with distributed HDMI and network extensions for clean client device hookups. The signal infrastructure used 4K media players for automated ambient screensavers when displays were idle, with USB-over-Ethernet extenders routed beneath the carpet layers for seamless remote peripheral connectivity across tables and panels.

Results

The Poki booth at GDC stood out on a show floor that sets a high bar for exhibition design in the gaming industry.

The rotating neon sign and 6-meter sign pole gave the booth overhead visibility that read across the Moscone Center floor, pulling GDC's developer audience in from a distance. Once inside, the banquette seating, gaming corner, and hospitality zone gave visitors multiple reasons to stay — each zone engineered to support a different kind of engagement without competing with the others.

The sound-dampened meeting room gave the Poki team a functional space for focused B2B conversations that genuinely felt removed from the ambient energy of the show floor — a meaningful operational advantage at a conference where deal-making and developer relationships are the primary currency.

The full build was structurally engineered, code-compliant, and precisely installed, delivering a trade show booth design that reflected the Poki brand's personality without sacrificing the infrastructure required to make it work.

Why It Matters

A 20x30 exhibit that carries a rotating neon sign, sound-dampened meeting rooms, custom banquette seating, a full gaming corner, and a hospitality zone — and still reads as one coherent environment — is a fabrication and engineering achievement as much as a design one. Show Ready built the Poki GDC booth to hold all of it.