mandag 8. februar 2010

Latest GamesBeat@GDC speakers: Facebook, GameStop Digital Ventures, Sony

We’re starting to get pretty excited about this. Our upcoming GamesBeat@GDC executive game conference is set for March 10 in San Francisco at the Game Developers Conference in the Moscone Convention Center. Today’s featured speakers are as follows:
Gareth Davis, platform manager, Facebook. Davis has a big responsibility at Facebook. There are more than 400 million users on the social network, and the No. 1 activity they do is play games. And while those games are free, Facebook and publishers such as Zynga are making hundreds of millions of dollars through virtual goods purchases. So Davis has to keep them happy, even as Facebook redesigns its user interface to be friendlier to everyone, not just gamers. And he also have to keep the thousands upon thousands of game developers happy as well. He headed the creation of Facebook’s new Games Dashboard, which helps gamers manage games and discover new ones. Davis appeared at our first GamesBeat event and he has been forever cursed with the title we gave him: Facebook’s chief gaming dude.
Chris Petrovic, senior vice president and general manager of GameStop Digital Ventures. He will appear on a panel on game investments. The conventional wisdom is that it’s just a matter of time before the Internet puts retailers out of business. But GameStop keeps opening hundreds of stores to sell games. Petrovic’s job is to figure out how to move some of GameStop’s business online, through digital distribution, downloadable content and other things that used to be heresy for retailers. Petrovic is in charge of integrating a digital strategy with GameStop’s core business, and he is responsible for strategy, incubation, and acquisition in the digital media space. Ask him about his prior job as a senior vice president for digital media at Playboy Enterprises. Yep, I guess he quit that job because he wanted free games.
Jack Buser, director of Sony PlayStation Home. He will be part of our panel on Disruptive Game Platforms. He is responsible for driving business initiatives in Sony’s Home virtual world for the PlayStation 3 in North America. Home has 10 million registered users and it recently launched Sodium, a social game within the virtual world that is monetized through a virtual goods model. Buser has 10 years of marketing experience and was previously director of worldwide technology evangelism at Dolby Laboratories. Buser loves the virtual life so much he has bits flowing through his veins.
Here’s a review of our theme for the conference:
Disruption 2.0. We’ll focus on the next disruptions that will happen in the video game industry. In the past couple of years, social games with virtual goods business models have proved themselves and shaken up the status quo. The iPhone has become a hot platform and Apple hopes to extend further into games with the iPad. Digital distribution and online games are growing. Will these trends gather more momentum and prove to be sustainable, or will new platforms and business models disrupt the disruptors?
The big game companies and brands are maneuvering into the market, even as successful startups are consolidating their gains and acquiring companies. Are console game makers poised to make a comeback as the recession ends? As growth returns to the industry in 2010, who will be poised to take market share and define the next-generation of games? Game companies that are doing the disrupting, adapting and growing will be speaking at the conference.
For more conference info, check out our GamesBeat 2010 web site and our Facebook Group for GamesBeat@GDC. Our sponsors include the Georgia Department of Economic Development and hi5.

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