Our latest speakers for our GamesBeat Summit 2018 event are a trio of famous game developers: Amy Jo Kim, David Edery, and Robin Hunicke. They’ll be doing a panel on the future of creativity in games, as part of our theme on the future of games. Maarten Noyons, head of the International Mobile Gaming Awards, will moderate the panel.
We’ve also switched venues to a secluded placed called The Seminary at Strawberry in Mill Valley, California, north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Our dates and agenda are still the same at April 9 and April 10. Our conference is all about making games better and improving the business, and our speakers should give us a window into the future of game technologies.
You can get your tickets here at 30 percent off our rate using the code DEAN. We’ve also got a new $500 code for indie game developers, IndieVIP, at this link.
Above: Robin Hunicke, cofounder of Funomena, at GamesBeat Summit 2017.
Hunicke is an indie game designer who gave a wonderful talk on the mass market for games at last year’s GamesBeat Summit 2017.
June 5th: The AI Audit in NYC
Join us next week in NYC to engage with top executive leaders, delving into strategies for auditing AI models to ensure fairness, optimal performance, and ethical compliance across diverse organizations. Secure your attendance for this exclusive invite-only event.
Hunicke is cofounder of Funomena, and she teaches game design at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She started her career at Electronic Arts, where she worked on MySims and Boom Blox. She was hired at Thatgamecompany and produced the award-winning Journey for the PlayStation 3. She joined Tiny Speck to work on the social online game Glitch. At Funomena, she has co-created Luna, a virtual reality puzzle game with a storybook world, and the upcoming Wattam.
Above: David Edery, CEO and cofounder of Spry Fox.
David Edery is the cofounder and CEO of Spry Fox, a Seattle game development studio focused on making the world a happier place. Spry Fox has developed several hit games including Alphabear, Steambirds, Triple Town, Bushido Bear, and Realm of the Mad God. Collectively, Spry Fox’s games have been played by over 50 million people worldwide. He also has a consulting company, Fuzbi, which he founded a year prior to founding Spry Fox. And before all of this, he worked for Microsoft as the Worldwide Games Portfolio Manager for the Xbox Live Arcade platform.
Back while Edery was working for Microsoft, he co-authored a book called Changing the Game: How Video Games are Transforming the Future of Business.
Above: Amy Jo Kim, game designer and startup coach, at GamesBeat Summit 2016.
Named by Fortune as one of the top 10 influential women in games, Amy Jo Kim is a world-renowned social game designer, community architect, and startup coach. Her design credits include Rock Band, The Sims, eBay, Ultima Online, Netflix, Covet Fashion, nytimes.com, Happify, Pley, and numerous startups.
Through her coaching practice, Amy Jo helps entrepreneurs & innovators 10X their product/market fit and drive long-term engagement. She holds a doctorate in Behavioral Neuroscience (along with a BA in Experimental Psychology) and teaches Game Thinking at Stanford University. Her highly-anticipated new book, Game Thinking, will be published in May 2018.
Above: Maarten Noyons of IMGA
Our moderator Maarten Noyons is the founder of the International Mobile Gaming Awards, the largest competition for mobile games in the world since 2004. The competition is now running in China, Southeast Asia, Middle East North Africa and the Global competition’s Awards Ceremony took place on March 1st, 2017.
He started out as a producer of music videos in London and Amsterdam, and moved to TV licensing in the 90s, selling TV formats and TV rights worldwide. In 1997 he co-founded a private incubator, funding a Finnish WAP portal, a Belgian e-commerce start-up and an interactive TV channel The Auction Channel, which he sold in 2001.
Maarten is currently working on the development of THE399 (‘the egg’) a pre-launch platform for games, connecting game makers to their first players.
Our speakers fit within our theme of The Future of Games: Better games, better business, the Time Machine. If you could see the future of games before it happens, that would give your business a competitive advantage. Our event will let the hottest game developers, publishers, and investors talk with their peers and business executives about their insights into the future of games.
GamesBeat Summit 2018 is the destination conference for networking, inspiration, and intelligent interaction. With the right people in the room to make great deals happen, our flagship industry event attracts the best game and tech developers and publishers, executives, marketers and venture capitalists. This event is intended for VP-level executives and the hottest game developers and publishers.
We’ll delve into the strategies of the future for gaming, and how to drive excitement, growth, and new startups. Our talks will feature augmented reality, virtual reality, esports, influencers, mobile games, core games, indies, new game technologies, and the connection between games, tech, and science fiction. We want to expose you to ideas like The Leisure Economy, where everyone in the future will be able to make a living playing games.
Games have changed as they’ve reached a billion people and $116 billion in yearly revenues, reaching the mainstream like they never have before. Can we still apply the lessons from the past to the current and future marketplace? And what type of innovations and companies will draw the blueprint of what’s to come? So much of the industry’s internal narrative has been about it being cutting-edge. How can we imagine a broader set of drivers other than technology that will shape the industry?
Our previously announced speakers include show host and Spiketrap cofounder Adam Sessler; science fiction writer Eliot Peper; John Hanke, CEO of Niantic Labs; Andrea Rene, game host; Aaron Loeb, president of FoxNext Games Studios; Philip Rosedale, CEO of High Fidelity; Janina Gavankar, lead actress of Star Wars: Battlefront II; congressional candidate Brianna Wu; Tencent’s Dan Brody, vice president of business development at Tencent; and Rand Miller, co-creator of Myst and Riven.
Others are John Underkoffler, CEO of Oblong Industries and science adviser for the influential sci-fi film Minority Report; Amit Kumar of Accel, a venture investor; Jon “Neverdie” Jacobs, CEO of Neverdie Studios. Josh Yguado, president and chief operating officer of Jam City; Matt McCloskey, vice president of commerce at Twitch; Joost van Dreunen, CEO of SuperData Research; Nick Earl, CEO of Glu; Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors; Michael Metzger, investment banker at Houlihan Lokey; Chris Heatherly, head of NBCUniversal’s new game business; Debbie Bestwick, CEO of Team17; Perrin Kaplan, principal at Zebra Partners; Stephanie Chan, writer at GamesBeat; Bill Roper, chief creative officer at Improbable; and Paul Bettner, CEO of Playful, the creator of the VR titles Lucky’s Tale.
Advisory board
- Nicole Lazzaro, CEO of XEO Design
- Noah Falstein, chief game designer at Google
- James Zhang, CEO of Concept Art House
- Joost van Dreunen, CEO of SuperData Research
- Peter Levin, president of Lionsgate Interactive
- Jamil Moledina, Google Play
- Michael Metzger, senior vice president at Houlihan Lokey
- Mihir Shah, CEO of Immersv
- Gordon Bellamy, visiting scholar at USC
- Kate Edwards, former executive director at IGDA
- Tom Sanocki, CEO of Limitless
- Phil Sanderson, managing director at Ridge Ventures
- Perrin Kaplan, principal at Zebra Partners
- Sibel Sunar, CEO of Fortyseven Communications
- David Edery, CEO of Spry Fox
- Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors
Topics will include:
- Intersection of sci-fi, games, and tech
- Platforms: Where to place your bets? AR, VR, & more
- Creating a culture of inspiration and creativity
- Emerging markets for games
- Monetization: How to acquire and retain users
- Esports and building the community
- Deals: Follow the money
- Diversity and the expanding ecosystem
- Early Access as a business model
- How mods can launch new game genres
- What game engine should you use?
Sponsors include: Intel, Worldpay, Appodeal, Accel, Streamlabs, Yomob, Worldpay, Altered Ventures, Consul General of Canada, Pearl Abyss, Leyou, Scalefast, and Gfycat.
