GamesBeat 2017 is at San Francisco’s beautiful Fort Mason on October 5 and October 6, and we’re delighted to announce our next three speakers: Dan Connors, the CEO and cofounder of Telltale Games; Joost van Dreunen, the CEO of SuperData Research; and Matt McCloskey, the vice president of commerce at Amazon’s Twitch livestreaming business.
If you’d like to go, you can save 40 percent on registration with our early bird discount code. These leaders have been around for a while, and they fit nicely with our retro theme, which enables us to extract the lessons of the past for the game leaders of today.
Connors will talk in a fireside chat about the evolution of storytelling in games, starting with his work at LucasArts up to Telltale. Connors started Telltale in 2004 with fellow LucasArts veterans Kevin Bruner and Troy Molander. They focused on episodic games with a focus on storytelling.
Based near the original LucasArts in San Rafael, California, Telltale created games such as Sam & Max, Tales of Monkey Island, and CSI: Fatal Conspiracy. But it had its breakout hit in 2012 with The Walking Dead, which was a gripping story-based game that forced players to make choices to survive the zombie apocalypse. Other big hits include The Wolf Among Us, Game of Thrones, Minecraft: Story Mode, and Batman: The Telltale Series. Connors was the founding CEO, and he stepped down in 2015 while cofounder Bruner ran the company, and he resumed the CEO job earlier this year. He also spent six years at LucasArts.
Joost van Dreunen is cofounder and CEO of SuperData Research. He’ll give an opening talk entitled, “We started at the bottom.” As traditional entertainment crumbles and begrudgingly assumes its new role in a digital world, video games have prospered and evolved into a mainstream form of entertainment. But what does it mean for an industry to now service a global media audience and assume a leading role in pop culture? Where do we place interactive entertainment in relation to movies and music? Will esports replace traditional sports? And, is it true that Gamergate cemented a discourse that would later manifest itself at the highest political levels?
Van Dreunen was one of early academics to study video games. He has over fifteen years of commercial research experience in interactive entertainment and creative industries. Before receiving a doctorate from Columbia University, Joost worked as an analyst on both the financial and consumer-side of the games industry. Anticipating the shift to digital games early on, he founded SuperData in 2009. Today, his firm is a leading games industry researcher, with clients such as Activision Blizzard, Apple, Electronic Arts, GameStop, Google, Microsoft, Nexon, PayPal and Wargaming.net. In addition to his business adventures, he teaches video games economics at the NYU Stern School of Business.
Matt McCloskey will talk about interesting monetization strategies, such as the new way to give tips to livestreamers during broadcasts. At Twitch, he is responsible for growing economic activity on the platform to help support content creators. He came to Twitch after 12 years at Microsoft’s Xbox division, most recently as the chief operating officer of 343 Industries, where he ran services engineering, finance, business operations, and strategy teams, and executive produced the live action online series Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn. Prior to 343, Matt led several business strategy initiatives across Xbox and Xbox Live, many focused on the future of entertainment in the cloud.
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 between 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 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?
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.
Our previously announced speakers include Robyn and Rand Miller, co-creators of Myst and Riven; Ed Fries, former head of Microsft Game Studios; Josh Yguado, president and chief operating officer of Jam City; Nick Earl, CEO of Glu; Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors; Michael Metzger, investment banker at Houlihan Lokey; Aaron Loeb, president of FoxNext Games; 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; 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.
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
- Kate Edwards, former executive director at IGDA
- 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?
Sponsors include: Intel, Appodeal, Accel, Epic Games, and Samsung.