GamesBeat's Dean Takahashi and Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari.
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The DeanBeat: Learning from the smartest people in the room

We had a lot of smart people speak at our GamesBeat Summit this week at the Cavallo Point resort in Sausalito, Calif., where our goal was to gather the right executives, CEOs, investors, and startup people in a big room so that we could see more big deals happen in gaming.

We’ll see soon enough if any deals come out of it. But on our main stage, the wisdom spilled over the sides. The learnings were a lot more than I can recount in this one column. But I figure it’s worth summarizing some of the things that made the most sense. And not surprisingly, the learnings were culled from years of experience and turned out to be really simple.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.