We’re grateful for a celebration of gaming at GamesBeat Next | The DeanBeat

I’m ready to see a lot of gaming people again and so GamesBeat Next is coming just in time for me. Things are different this time so I thought I’d fill you in.

On Monday (October 23), we’ll kick off with registration opening at 1 p.m. Pacific time. We’ll likely cut registration off at 11 a.m. on Monday as we’re close to being sold out. The event is taking place across October 23 and October 24 at Convene, 40 O’Farrell Street in San Francisco. (You can use this code, deangbn2325, for a 25% discount). The updated agenda is here.

Just about four weeks ago, we had about 29 attendees. We had a layoff at VentureBeat. We had a late start on this event. We had to change venues twice, and we switched the days we were doing the event. That’s a lot for our team to deal with in a short time, and a lot for attendees to deal with as well. But we’ve got an awesome team, led by our event director David Glass. At last check, we were closing in on 600 attendees. Thank you all so much for responding and signing up, even if you waited a little longer than normal. We’re so glad you have faith in our ability to pull off a decent event.

Grateful

Our sponsors include Xsolla, Google Cloud, Forte, Amazon Games, nWay, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), Stardust, Bain, Scuti, The Sandbox, Modulate, Resolution Games, Bitwave and Level Infinite. We have community partners in the International Game Developers Association, the Blockchain Game Alliance and more. Some of these folks directly responded to our plea for help. Thank you.

We’re so grateful as this event wouldn’t have happened without those sponsors. I’m thankful for our staff and our emcees Zsuzsa James of the Finnish consulate, Chris Melissinos of AWS, and David Hoppe of Gamma Law. Our awesome advisers helped me get 94 speakers, not counting five surprise guests who are the winners of our Game Changers 2023 game startup list. That project was orchestrated by Lightspeed in partnership with GamesBeat and selected by an all-star list of game industry judges.

The talks on Monday kick off at 1:30 p.m. with our lone virtual-only talk, a fireside chat between me and The Sandbox’s new chief content officer, Nicola Sebastiani. Then we’ll move into our in-person talks, which will be recorded but not livestreamed. Our first in-person chat will be a fireside between Joe Ferencz, CEO of Gamefam, and Andrew Willson, partner at Makers Fund, on our subject of user-generated content. They will kick off our event with the theme of Playing The Edge, or the notion that the edges of the game industry offer the best possibilities for expansion in the future.

A year ago, many of the talks were concentrated on the topics of the overhyped metaverse and blockchain games. This year, those sectors have cooled down and are less visible at the event.

Philip Rosedale, creator of Second Life and a senior adviser at Linden Lab, will talk about why the metaverse isn’t dead, while a panel including Raph Koster of Playable Worlds and Second Life co-creator Cory Ondrejka will explore the practical metaverse. Panels led by Stardust and Forte will also look into the survivors in blockchain who are doing high-quality Web3 games.

But we’ve got plenty of other contenders that fit with the theme of Playing The Edge. Even while we’re dealing with a very difficult slowdown — with lots of layoffs and geopolitical and economic headwinds — there are sectors that are doing well in games right now.

Kristian Segerstrale, CEO of Super Evil Megacorp will get to chat with Sebastien DeHalleux, cofounder of Matchday, as they reminisce their startup Playfish and talk about new trends like games and Hollywood and social gaming.

I’m looking forward to what Emily Greer, CEO of Double Loop Games, and her panel have to say on the post-mortem around Unity’s price increase and what it means for the future of platforms and game engines.

In something new for us, we’ll have a discussion about how to find a job in gaming in a conversation between Ninel Gryuner Anderson, CEO of Devoted Studios, and Amir Satvat, business development director at Tencent. Satvat is a quant who has helped hundreds of people find jobs through his free listings on LinkedIn. Not only will his tips be helpful for job seekers, Satvat will also give us insights from looking at data from the bottoms up as he studies job openings at 832 game companies globally.

I always like to see what comes from the marriage of technology and creativity. Jenova Chen, CEO of Thatgamecompany, will have good insights for us on marrying an emotion-focused game design with technology for putting lots of people into the same concert-like event to experience that emotion together. Chen’s team pulled this off with Sky: Children of the Light. We’ll close out day one with talks about the future of gaming hardware and the role of ambitious game startups financed with money from the biggest game VCs.

Day two October 24 — Starting with Women in Gaming

We’re kicking off day two at 8:30 a.m. with our seventh Women in Gaming Breakfast, sponsored by Amazon Games. GamesBeat writer Rachel Kaser will get dressed up in cosplay and moderate a panel on how your career can unfold in unpredictable ways. The women-only session will feature food for thought from Sarah Anderson, head of global marketing and partnerships at Amazon Games, as well as industry veterans Perrin Kaplan (Zebra Partners), Erica Larson (Google) and Monika Madrid (Magid).

Jack Buser of Google Cloud will tell us about the benefits of Google Cloud, and Forte’s session including Matt Wolf of Zynga, Neil Young and Josh Williams of Forte, and Johnny Casamassinas of Plai Labs will talk about surviving the blockchain gaming lull.

Miko Matsumura of Gumi Cryptos will lead a separate session exploring the right way and wrong way to do blockchain games. And I will talk with Taehoon Kim, CEO of Animoca’s nWay, about the company’s novel Wreck League that blends Web3, Web2, esports and a fighting game all in one package. We’ll probe into Kim’s theory that Web2 and Web3 gamers need each other.

The AI wilderness

We’ll also veer off into the opportunity for alternative app stores with Xsolla’s session exploring the European Union’s Digital Markets Act going into effect next spring. CJ Bangah of PwC will talk with GamesBeat writer Jordan Fragen to show us interesting numbers about the rise of gaming culture and the numbers associated with it, while Jon Radoff of Beamable and Edward Saatchi of Fable will lead two separate sessions probing the opportunities and challenges of AI and gaming. Davin Miyoshi of Skillprint will give a solo talk on using AI to personalize games.

Nicholas Longano of Scuti will have a session about ways to bridge sports fans and games. Eric Goldberg will moderate a session with Joe Tou of Sony Ventures, Andrew Sheppard of Transcend Fund, and Jake Perlman-Garr of Riot Games on corporate investments and acquisitions in gaming.

The Entertainment Software Association is also bringing us a session on keeping creativity alive in indie games. Barefoot Tasha will moderate a session with JumpButton Studios’ Nicodemus Reuben Madehdo, Michael Berthaud and Jay-Ann Lopez, who also runs Black Girl Gamers.

Kaser will be back with a session looking at the promise of mixed reality in the wake of the launch of the Meta Quest 3 and ahead of the launch of the Apple Vision Pro. Fragen will also moderate a talk on the Unreal Engine Fortnite community.

Fan Shen, an investor formerly at Dapper Labs, will lead a talk on emerging markets with Lucy Hoffman of Carry1st in South Africa and Lisa Cosmas Hanson of Niko Partners.

Hank Howie of Modulate will regale us with the need to moderate game communities of all sizes. And I will interview Steve Zhao of Sandbox VR about the opportunities in location-based entertainment and his Squid Game VR experience.

We’ll close with some very special sessions. The Tetris Titans Maya Rogers, president of Tetris; Henk Rogers, chairman of Tetris; and Alexey Pajitnov, creator of Tetris will talk about the 40th anniversary of Tetris, the game’s genesis, and the recent Tetris movie with super nerdy former game journalist Chris Kohler, a classic games expert now with Digital Eclipse.

Game Changers

Then we’ll have our Game Changers session. Moritz Baier-Lentz of Lightspeed and I will introduce the startup list. We had hundreds of applications to get to our top 25 companies, which we will reveal at the event. We’ll also introduce three of our judges — Michael Chow, CEO of Believer; Kylan Gibbs, CPO of Inworld AI; and Bonnie Rosen, general manager of Disney Accelerator — to talk about the context for the session and the state of the games industry. And then we’ll have presentations from our five surprise winners.

Besides this group and me and Baier-Lentz, our other judges were Anna Sweet, CEO of Bad Robot Games; Ben Feder, former Tencent president and board member of Epic Games; Danny Lange of Google BI and AI; Holly Liu, Y Combinator visiting partner and cofounder of Kabam; John Hanke, CEO of Niantic; John Thompson, former chairman of Microsoft; and Ken Wee, chief strategy officer at Activision Blizzard.

Once again, I’m grateful and amazed at what Lightspeed was able to pull off with this contest and can’t for everybody to celebrate the winners. Given all that has happened in the world, it’s great to be able to celebrate something like this.