GamesBeat 2017 will take place at San Francisco’s beautiful Fort Mason on October 5 and October 6. And our next trio of speakers features both fresh faces and veterans from the video game industry.
Our speakers include Debbie Bestwick, CEO of award-winning veteran games developer and international games label, Team17. Bestwick started making games at age 17, and she cofounded Team17 in 1990 at the age of 20. Team17 hosts theWorms franchise, Aven Colony, The Escapists, Genesis Alpha One, Overcooked, Yoku’s Island Express, Yooka-Laylee, and Sword Legacy: Omen. Bestwick has released 90 games with Team17 across home computers, console and mobile platforms.
Since becoming CEO in 2010, she has focused on establishing Team17 as a sustainable business which achieves year-on-year profitability and growth. As a result, Team17 last year raised $20 million in funding last year. Team17’s Games Label helps support new startup’s and existing development studio’s create new IP and build for sustainability while retaining Independence. She has recently received a member of the British Empire award for services to the video games industry and was awarded Businesswoman of the Year in the 2016 Women in Games Awards.
Perrin Kaplan, principal at Zebra Partners and the former head of marketing at Nintendo. Kaplan is a veteran of the video game console wars. She joined Nintendo as corporate communications manager in 1992, and she became director of corporate affairs in 1996. She helped launch big portable and console hits such as the original Pokémon titles and Donkey Kong Country, and she helped get consoles such as the tremendously successful Nintendo Wii off the ground. Kaplan rose to vice president of marketing and corporate affairs. She left Nintendo at the beginning of 2008.
In 2009, Kaplan teamed up with former Nintendo colleagues Beth Llewelyn and Kelli Koenig Homer to form Zebra Partners, a marketing and PR firm for the video game industry. She has moderated several panels for us over the years, and she has worked with Fortune 100 companies including Intel, Qualcomm, Sony, Facebook, and Microsoft. Kaplan is a marketing strategist with a diverse background in consumer entertainment, politics, and journalism.
And our third new speaker is GamesBeat’s Stephanie Chan, our general assignment reporter in New York. Chan joined us earlier this year after writing about games as a freelancer while working at the media company Poncho, where she went from managing editor to head of operations and editorial. Her gaming bylines include Killscreen and Outermode, and she’s also a published sci-fi fiction author and reviews speculative fiction for Strange Horizons.
While at GamesBeat, Stephanie has focused on breaking news, interesting tidbits, and analysis. She has an interest in the indie gaming scene and how people make games, and she recently traveled to cover both the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) and the Brazil Independent Games Festival for us.
Our previously announced speakers include Tim Chang, managing director at Mayfield Fund; Ramez Naam, science fiction author and writer of the Nexus series; Herman Narula, CEO of Improbable; Bill Roper, chief creative officer at Improbable; Paul Bettner, CEO of Playful, the creator of the VR titles Lucky’s Tale and Steven Roberts, chairman of ESL, the biggest independent esports tournament company; Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of CCP Games, creator of Eve Online and VR games such as Eve Valkyrie; and Bernie Stolar, CEO of The Stolar Group and former head at Sony’s U.S. PlayStation business and Sega of America.
They will speak to our theme of the Time Machine. If you could see the future of games before it happens, that would give your business a competitive advantage. It’s like having a time machine, where you can see the future and return to the present. You could also go back to the past to the retro days of gaming to get the lessons that matter. This is the idea driving the theme for our GamesBeat 2017 conference.
We don’t know exactly what’s going to happen in games, and that’s what makes it fun and unpredictable. But we’ll make sure that we get the most interesting leaders of the industry to speak. And we won’t just talk about old times. Rather, we’ll pair the speakers from the past with the leaders of today, so they can talk about the relevant strategies for the future.
We’ll touch on the parts of gaming that are driving excitement, growth, and new startups. That includes augmented reality, virtual reality, esports, influencers, mobile games, core games, indies, new game technologies, and the connection games, tech, and science fiction. We want to show you the edge and the strategies that will succeed in the future.
The past can be prologue. But games have changed as they’ve reached a billion people and $100 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 market place? 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 shape the industry?
GamesBeat 2017 is the destination conference for networking, inspiring talks, intelligent interaction, and getting all the right people in the room to make great deals happen. It targets game and tech industry CEOs, executives, marketers, investors, venture capitalists, and developers.
Advisory board
- Nicole Lazzaro, CEO of XEO Design
- Nick Beliaeff, senior vice president at Spin Master
- Noah Falstein, chief game designer at Google
- James Zhang, CEO of Concept Art House
- Joost van Dreunen, CEO of SuperData Research
- Nathan Stewart, Dungeons & Dragons senior director, Wizards of the Coast
- Peter Levin, president of Lionsgate Interactive
- Ravi Belwal, Facebook Games
- Jamil Moledina, Google Play
- Sunny Dhillon, partner at Signia Venture Partners
- Michael Metzger, senior vice president at Houlihan Lokey
- Mihir Shah, CEO of Immersv
- Zvi Greenstein, general manager at Nvidia
- Gordon Bellamy, visiting scholar at USC
- Tadgh Kelly, Vreal
- Tom Sanocki, CEO of Limitless
- Phil Sanderson, managing director at IDG Ventures
- Walter Driver, CEO of Scopely
- David Pokress, senior vice president at AdColony
- 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?