Roundtable Leaders

Alex Amsel

Head of Blockchain Strategy, Fig
Understanding the value of blockchains in gaming
Blockchains are one of the hottest new technologies around and gaming is seen as a natural use case. However, what is the real value blockchains can offer and how can game developers use it? Are blockchains ready for the big time or are we still at the experimentation stage? There are many blockchain gaming projects in development and they cover a wide variety of use cases. Join Alex Amsel, Fig's Head of Blockchain Strategy, to discuss the state of blockchain gaming today and understand how blockchains may offer new opportunities for innovation in future.

Claire Baert

Consultant, Citizen Science Games
Video games to tackle 21st century greatest challenges
With citizen science games, players actively contribute to real science. They already help find protein structures (Foldit), design RNA molecules (EteRNA), generate data for the largest research on dementia in history (Sea Hero Quest) and could be the next ones to discover an exoplanet (EVE Online). Game developers can make powerful and engaging games, and games can become tools leading to scientific discoveries. Let's discuss how the games industry and scientists can collaborate to give players opportunities to solve today's biggest challenges.

Thomas Bidaux

CEO, ICO Partners
What are the opportunities for the blockchain technology in the video games industry?
This roundtable will be an opportunity to debate and discuss on the opportunities the blockchain technology creates for the video games industry, from the infrastructure level to the actual mechanics in the games, as well as the existing alternatives to the technology and their own pros and cons.

Mike Bithell

CEO and Founder, Bithell Games
Checking in on Cheap Games, Bundles and Deep Discounts in 2018
Bithell will be leading a discussion around competitive pricing amongst premium games. Where are people having successes, where are challenges emerging?

Manon Burgel

CEO, B2Expand
Monetizing Games with Blockchain
Creating games on Blockchain can improve user experiences through asset tokenization & cross-gaming between projects. Publishers have more transparency with their audience through public micro-transactions as long as they consider the scalability of their dApps. Join Burgel in a discussion to discuss how best to monetize your games using Blockchain.

Nick Button-Brown

Executive, Near Future Society
How Games can teach Social responsibility and critical thinking
2018 brings Games an opportunity to teach social responsibility in a way that no other medium can deliver. This roundtable will look at some examples of how Indie titles have addressed social issues successfully and how those messages were delivered. Should we be dealing with subjects like Immigration, Psychosis and Mental Health, making them part of the ongoing narrative. Let us discuss as a panel the subjects that Games have a responsibility to consider, for example how the depiction of War within Games should be impacted by the rules of the Geneva Convention.

Chris Charla

Director - ID@Xbox, Microsoft
Maximizing Sales and Discovery on Digital Platforms
Share your best practices for maximizing sales and discovery on digital platforms, learn what works and what doesn’t? How can you best evaluate sales and the games environment in a post-Steam Spy world? Let’s talk with each other and find out! We’ll talk about marketplaces as well as non-marketplace ways to break through.

Bernd Diemer

Creative Director, DICE Studios (EA Digital Illusions CE AB)
A Conversation about Ideas, Creative Process and Direction
Join Bernd in a conversation about what happens after you've had the idea of the century. What do you do next? How do you nurture ideas into reality? How do you share it with your team, and how do you keep its heart beating throughout the journey to ship? What are the tools and methods in your magic creative toolbox? Chat about personal process, methods and experiences, compare similarities and discuss challenges encountered.

Kate Edwards

CEO & Principal Consultant, Geogrify
Conquering New Worlds - Strategies for Achieving Market Relevance
Games are a ubiquitous form of entertainment and enjoyed by people across a wide demographic range. However, many of the games we make still narrowly confine their creative focus to an audience based on an array of assumptions - whether it's a prepackaged target group (e.g., "mid-core"), a region, or even a culture. From localization to culturalization, from global distribution strategies to specific market penetration, this round table will discuss the strategies we can employ to not merely distribute the games we create but actually strive to make them more relevant to the new geographies into which we're aiming to launch.

David Helgason

Founder and Board Member, Unity Technologies
Anything Unity
David loves meeting current and future users of Unity. Join him on a roundtable to discuss the past, present, and future of Unity as an engine and platform.

Celia Hodent

Game User Experience Consultant
Developing a UX Mindset
Making games is hard. Although there is no known recipe for crafting successful video games, developers can use ingredients and methodologies from user experience (UX) to increase the likeliness of their game to be fun and engaging. Join Hoden on her roundtable to further discuss best practices to develop a UX strategy for your project or studio.

Robin Hunicke

CEO and Co-Founder, Funomena
Creative Development for VR, AR & Emerging Experimental Platforms
Funomena has a history of bringing its games to emerging platforms, and is currently working on projects for Magic Leap and VR platforms. Robin Hunicke will lead a discussion exploring the unique creative opportunities when developing experiences and games for emerging AR and VR platforms, along with the challenges and inventive troubleshooting required while working on these experiences.

Hendrik Lesser

Chairman, EGDF
Loot Boxes Under Fire: What’s Next if Europe Pulls the Plug on Purchasable Boxes?
Gambling or gaming? Recent legislation and court rulings in EU countries like Belgium have alerted our industry, as it could be the final curtain for microtransaction-based loot boxes. While different EU bodies seriously struggle to come up with a harmonised regulation, the current state of loot box law in Europe is a patchwork. Chat with Lesser about the state of legislation and what it means for developers and publishers. Discuss new means to replace the microtransaction economy in case the EU should fully pull the plug on loot boxes in games.

Ollie Lewis

Co-Founder, Near Future Society
What games can learn from Science?
2018 brings us a confusing and changing world. How can we use an awareness of psychology, neuroscience and an understanding of the present state of the world to create appealing, compelling and therefore commercially successful games. This session will discuss the benefits of combining Hard Science with Social Science, and how that can impact on designing games. We will talk about how we can work with scientists outside of our industry to create meaningful reasons to play games, as an evolution compulsion loops.

Adam Orth

Chief Creative Officer, Gaming Corps
Keep Yourself Alive: Surviving Early VR
The embryonic landscape of XR (VR/AR/MR) is ever-changing as technology, hardware and experiences evolve at a light speed. What seemed revolutionary yesterday could be irrelevant tomorrow. As a developer, it’s crucial be nimble and be able and recognize these changes as the market grows so that your business can survive, thrive and revolutionize the industry through your products and services. Adam Orth will lead a roundtable discussion on strategies VR developers and studios can use to stay ahead of the curve with their business and become innovators as the consumer base explodes.

Patric Palm

Chair, CEO, and Co-founder - Favro
Studio Organisation, Leadership and Tools in an Era of VR/AR and Games-as-a-Service
In this roundtable, we will swap experiences and ideas around how VR/AR and Games-as-a-Service affects studio and team organization, leadership, culture, and tools. We additionally address the challenges of distributed development, scaling large productions, and hiring the best talent, in this new era.

Vlad Panchenko

Founder & CEO, DMarket
New Monetization Opportunities in the Blockchain Era
The new era of blockchain has completely changed how currency and monetization is discovered and acquired. CEO and Founder of DMarket, Vlad Panchenko, shares how the evolution of fintech has brought up numerous opportunities for various markets, especially the games industry. This roundtable will share different strategies to breach this new, digital era to its fullest and where enthusiasts might be able to find the next billion dollar opportunity in digital currency.

Bill Roper

Chief Creative Officer, Improbable
Promoting a Culture of Creativity
There is a direct connection between promoting a creative culture, building the right team, and creating great projects. We'll share ideas and examine how to bring structure to the creative process, establish best practices for fostering creativity, and put design principles first.

Catherine Seys

Startup Program Director
Ubisoft’s Strategic Innovation Lab
How Collaboration Between Corporations and Start-ups Foster Creativity and Innovation?
Ubisoft has become a world leader in video games by capitalizing on creative and technological breakthroughs to create original worlds and immersive gaming experiences. Ubisoft joined Station F, the world's biggest start-up campus, to make its expertise available to start-ups in a spirit of cooperation and mutual enrichment. By leading the Gaming and Entertainment vertical/program, Ubisoft encourages entrepreneurs to explore new topics such as blockchain and mixed realities and give them the tools to express their vision of tomorrow's entertainment and push the boundaries of creativity and innovation. Join Catherine to discuss the different approaches to foster relationships between corporations and start-ups.

Sibel Sunar

CEO, fortyseven communications
Communications for the Rest of Us
So you have a game/company/product that doesn't have a traditional marketing campaign or doesn't have easy pre-launch hooks. How should you think about PR? Why do it? What do do? Come hear about and share ways to think about communications when you have to get visibility for products and companies that don't neatly fit in traditional press cycles, or don't have pre-launch audiences.

Attila Szantner

Co-Founder and CEO, Massively Multiplayer Online Science
Videogames: Our Hope for the Future
Advancements in AI and machine learning predict major changes in society, changes that can manifest in a substantial portion of the population being left without a meaningful job and occupation. As Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind proposes: it may be the case that videogames will provide us with new goals in the virtual spaces so that we don't lose our sanity of not having to do anything in the real world. This would reposition the strategical place of videogames in our societies. Will videogames be even more core to our lives? Let's discuss how we see the role of videogames in the maybe not so distant future.

Kelly Wallick

CEO and Founder of Indie MEGABOOTH, Chairperson of Independent Games Festival (IGF)
Curating for the Future - How Discoverability and Audience Diversification Shapes our Industry
It seems everyone has an opinion on how to address the curation and discoverability issues arising from high volume, open platform distribution. So what's working? What influence does how, and who, we curate for affect the overall landscape of the gaming industry at large? How do we find and retain the diversity of audiences needed to create and grow a healthy ecosystem? What methods can we use to connect these audiences with new and emerging content? This is especially important on the fringes of the independent scene, but the ripples can be felt in both big and small studios across the industry. Join Kelly as she facilitates a conversation around the quietly influential role of curators, tastemakers and the big and small decisions that will shape the future of gaming.