GamesBeat Next will address how gaming can get back to growth

Hey GamesBeat community! GamesBeat Next 2024 is coming on October 28-29 in San Francisco with a theme of “Back to Growth” for the conference. And I’m glad to announce our initial slate of speakers.

For 17 years, our conferences and community have been about heart and soul of gaming and the technology behind it. Our task is to help educate the leaders and future leaders of the game industry when it comes to creating a sustainable, fair and fun industry for all who get joy from making games. (Our buy one, get one free offer ends on Friday August 17).

These initial speakers for our event reflect a wide array of interests and topics in gaming, but we will always focus on the intersection of games and other spheres such as technology — the things at the edge of gaming that can create growth in the future — or other growth opportunities like Hollywood. As we all know, gaming and tech constantly change, and we hope that our event will be the best place to catch up on visionary ideas about the future — and practical ideas of how to get back to growth.

We’re so proud and pleased to announce our speakers include Neal Stephenson, author of Snow Crash and cofounder of Lamina1. We also have Peter Moore, former executive at Unity, Microsoft, EA, and Sega. Few have had such a sweeping view of the big companies in the industry as Moore.  

Matthew Bromberg, CEO of Unity, joined the game engine maker about 90 days ago to help it refocus on a culture of execution and accountability. I interviewed him for an article that ran this morning, and he has agreed to be a speaker at GamesBeat Next 2024 as well.

A welcoming place

We’ve also got people from the heart of triple-A development as speakers.

Amy Hennig, co-president of Skydance, has had an amazing career as a triple-A developer, having worked on the Uncharted series while at Naughty Dog as well as many other triple-A narrative/action adventure games. She will speak on a panel entitled “Seats at the table: Fostering a welcoming workplace,” moderated by Perrin Kaplan, principal at Zebra Partners. The talk will also include Andrea Silvers, vice president of marketing and communications at Skydance; and Jenna Seiden, senior vice president of business development, licensing, and publishing at Skydance.

The 2024 State of the Game Industry report from the Game Developers Conference noted that nothing has changed when it comes to the representation of women in the industry. Skydance Games is working hard to change that perception.

As Skydance continues to increase gender representation across their studios, women currently hold lead positions in business, design, production, and other disciplines for their console, VR, PC, and mobile titles. This panel will explore how they’ve fostered an inclusive workplace, the importance of having more diverse voices on triple-A titles and explain the critical role studios have in providing more seats to underrepresented communities.

A slate of all-star speakers

We also expect to host our ninth Women in Gaming Breakfast on the morning of October 29, and Xsolla is back as a sponsor, this time hosting our Diversity in Gaming lunch. Our community partners include Women Led Games, Black in Gaming and more to be announced soon.

We are also a media partner for #NGSC24, an event in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which is focused on The Future of Fandom. The event takes place n August 24-25 on the same weekend as finale of the Esports World Cup. I’ll be heading to NGSC24 and the Esports World Cup as well.

Riz Virk, faculty associate at Arizona State University and founder of Play Labs, will also be speaking at our event. We’ll also have talks from Christina Seelye, CEO of Maximum Entertainment and Khizer Kuderi, assistant clinical professor at Stanford University and an esports expert.

Our other speakers include Tsahi Liberman, founder Styrax Studios; Kerestrall Smith, CEO of Another Axiom and the maker of Gorilla Tag in virtual reality; Elan Lee, founder of Exploding Kittens/Fourth Wall; Kieran Donovan, CEO of k-id; Joanna Popper, veteran XR leader; Rachel Kaser, GamesBeat writer; Dean Takahashi, lead writer for GamesBeat; Jordan Fragen, GamesBeat writer;

We’ll get a lay of the land on the revival of games venture capital from a panel that includes Josh Chapman, managing partner at Konvoy Ventures. More speakers who are veterans of our stage include Perrin Kaplan, principal at Zebra Partners, and Moritz Baier-Lentz, Lightspeed. I’ve got plenty of other invitations pending and we’re looking for sponsored talks as well.

Convene venue

You can’t have a great event without a great place to do it.

We’ll be returning to Convene, a venue in the heart of San Francisco’s Union Square area. It is a welcoming space built for community, as it was created to be an event space. We were the very first event at the venue last year and now we’re coming back for a second year, this time using both the fourth and fifth floors for our expanded conference agenda.

The event will start at about 1 p.m. Pacific time on October 28 and then continue all day long on October 29. At the last event, we had two stages running simultaneously. We hope to deliver more value with a total of three stages this year.

And we’ll have more content in the form of eight roundtables spread through both days in private rooms. These sessions, which are open to sponsorship, will have up to 30 attendees in a private session as you can see above.

Neal Stephenson talk

The metaverse trended for a couple of years as humanity’s answer to the pandemic and remote work. Neal Stephenson, the author of the science fiction novel Snow Crash and cofounder of blockchain tech firm Lamina1, has been the high priest of this metaverse religion, as he coined the term “metaverse.”

And after 30 years of waiting for science fiction to become reality, Stephenson doesn’t want the metaverse to turn out to be a dystopia. Concerned that big tech companies could turn the metaverse into a bunch of walled gardens, Stephenson cofounded Lamina1 with Peter Vessenes to build the open metaverse in 2022. He spoke at our first GamesBeat Next event in October 2022 about how to build the open metaverse. But a lot has changed since then.

He has joined the AI storytelling startup Whenere. We’re looking forward to an update on his views on AI, tech and games. The last we heard, Stephenson believed in openness and that economic transactions should be transparent. And he thinks people who contribute things to a solution should have their contributions tracked, and compensated if it’s worth something.

Stephenson talked before about his view of blockchain technology, and why it can be used to create a decentralized metaverse. He also believes that games will lead the way to the future, as we need to have something fun to do when the metaverse arrives. Game developers are also the ones who are competent enough with the 3D game engines that must be used to create the 3D animations of the metaverse.

He recently talked with futurist Matthew Ball and Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney about topics including Snow Crash 2, generative AI ethics, blockchain and the Apple Vision Pro. By October, we’ll expect he’s going to have a lot more to say.

Game Changers

We will also close day two with our second annual Game Changers celebration of the list of the coolest game startups. Moritz Baier-Lentz, partner and head of gaming at Lightspeed Venture Partners, the venture capital firm with more than $28 billion under management.

Last year, Baier-Lentz surprised the 25 finalists by putting their companies on the Nasdaq Tower electronic billboard for the world to see in Times Square in New York. Startup entrepreneurs can file an application here for your chance to be one of the finalists.

Maier-Lentz has already recruited a list of all-star judges for the new list, and we’re proud to partner with him, Lightspeed and Nasdaq again to bring the newest gaming startup stars to our stage.

We are in better shape than last year. If you recall, we had a nail-biting time as the game industry was in the midst of difficult layoffs. We had our own cutbacks and we only had about 29 attendees signed up a month ahead of the event. We put out a call for help and you responded. Sponsors signed up and we had more than 550 attendees by the time of the event in October 2023.

This time, we have been able to sign up speakers earlier and kick off our plans earlier. We could still use your help in rounding up both speakers and sponsors, as well as help getting the word out so we can get more paid attendees to the event. We are looking for a sponsor for the Women in Gaming Breakfast.

We’re proud to have returning sponsors including Xsolla, Fastspring, Modulate, the Entertainment Software Association as well as new sponsors such as Open World, Fastly and Ready.GG. If you’d like to request sponsorship information, you can fill out this form. For earned or sponsored talks, please follow this link.