We’re taking GamesBeat Summit 2020 into a digital online-only format. And here’s the next slate of speakers: Neil Young, CEO of N3twork; Bing Gordon, chief product officer at Kleiner Perkins; and Kate Edwards, executive director at Global Game Jam.
We’ve added these speakers to the updated agenda, posted below, for the event which will air on April 28 and April 29 as a virtual conference. If you are interested in attending GamesBeat Summit online, please sign up here.
After careful thought about the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic, we decided not to use centralized studios or physical locations. But we think we can serve our GamesBeat community well with a fully distributed, digital event.
The health and safety of our GamesBeat community, attendees, employees, and sponsors remains our top priority. In this digital event, attendees can watch livestreamed and recorded talks, take part in online networking sessions and digital roundtables, access our gaming partners virtually, and more.
Neil Young, CEO of N3twork
Neil is the founder and CEO of N3twork. Prior to founding N3twork, Youngl was the CEO and cofounder of Ngmoco, the social mobile games company, and he served on the board of Japanese Internet company DeNA, which acquired the startup in November 2010. Following the acquisition, Young oversaw DeNA’s Western business, product development and publishing operations.
Before Ngmoco, Neil served as group general manager and vice president at Electronic Arts. During his tenure at EA, Young was responsible for EA’s Los Angeles, Maxis, Origin, and Blueprint Studio groups that produced some of EA’s most successful game franchises, including The Lord of the Rings, The Sims, Medal of Honor, and Command & Conquer.
Young will do a fireside chat with Bing Gordon.
Bing Gordon, chief product officer at Kleiner Perkins
Bing Gordon co-founded Electronic Arts in 1982, and helped create and extend many of its biggest franchises including Madden, The Sims, Sim City, Command and Conquer, Need for Speed, Ultima Online, Pogo. He also launched the EA Sports brand, and helped studios like EA Canada and EA Montreal achieve their greatest successes. Since joining venture capital leading firm Kleiner Perkins (an original investor in EA), he has advised and/or invested in Zynga, Ngmoco, N3twork, Amazon Games, Twitch, Niantic, Linden Labs, Manticore, Wevr Labs, that game company, Azarus, Stream Captain and Magic Leap.
He currently is director or board observer to Amazon, Airtime, Betterworks, Duolingo, Linden Labs, Tradesy, Truecaller, Zazzle, and Zynga. He has worked with many of the leading game makers in history, including Sid Meier, Brian Reynolds, Will Wright, Lucy Bradshaw, Robin Hunicke, Richard Garriott, Warren Spector, Chris Roberts, Neil Young, Don Mattrick, John Schappert, Steve Chiang, Brian Fargo, Joe Ybarra, Bruce McMillan, Glen Schofield, Richard Hilleman, Mike Verdu, John Hanke, Frederick Descamps and Jordan Maynard, Louis Castle, Brett Sperry, Mark Skaggs, Peter Molyneux, Demis Hassabis, Alex Ward and Fiona Sperry, Mark Pincus, Rich Lawrence, and John Smedley.
Gordon held the world’s first ever endowed chair in video game design at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, and received the Entertainment Software Association Champion Award in 2004, and the Lifetime Achievement award in 2011 from the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. He still logs hours of gameplay per day.
Kate Edwards, executive director of Global Game Jam
Kate Edwards is the executive director of the Global Game Jam, as well as the CEO and principal consultant of Geogrify, a consultancy which pioneered content culturalization.
She is also a board member of Take This and was the executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) from 2012 to 2017. In addition to being an award-winning advocate who serves in several advisory roles, she is a geographer, writer, and corporate strategist. Following 13 years at Microsoft, she has consulted on many game and non-game projects for BioWare, Google, Amazon, Facebook, LEGO, and many other companies.
Fortune magazine named her as one of the “10 most powerful women” in the game industry in 2013 and in 2014 was named by GamesIndustry.biz as one of their six People of the Year. Besides being recently awarded by Reboot Develop, IndieCade, and GameRome for her advocacy work in the global game industry, she has been honored with the Ambassador Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards at GDC 2020. She is also profiled in the December 2018 publication Women in Gaming: 100 Professionals of Play.
Edwards will moderate a panel dubbed “Player Behavior: Your Secret Growth Tool” with Carlos Figueiredo, director of trust and safety at Two Hat Security; Clara Siegel, product manager with Facebook Gaming supporting gaming video and community products; and Kim Voll, cofounder of Stray Bombay.
Event details
GamesBeat Summit Digital will provide the same great content and create digital networking experiences, all available remotely. We’ve very grateful that the overwhelming number of our speakers (which we originally recruited for our physical event) and our sponsors have stayed with us. We hope to live up to their belief in us with our talks around the theme of Dawn of the Next Generation.
We will continue to be proactive in our communication and will follow up with more information about technology platforms and logistics in the coming days. It looks like we’re heading toward an even larger even with about 115 speakers. The schedule is still subject to change. Here’s the agenda.