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Beyond Awareness: Supporting Neurodiverse Teams Without Burning Out Managers
Over the last few years, awareness of neurodiversity and mental health in games has grown significantly. Many studios now genuinely want to do better. The challenge is sustaining that support in a way that works for both employees and the people managing them.
This talk focuses on what happens after awareness, when good intentions meet deadlines, live projects, and already stretched managers. It explores the practical realities of supporting neurodiverse teams in fast paced production environments.
Drawing on real examples from global AAA teams, I will examine what support actually helps neurodivergent employees thrive, where accommodations can unintentionally create friction, and how emotional labour often quietly shifts onto managers without the tools to carry it. We will look at how to move from reactive, individual fixes to team level systems that protect psychological safety without burning people out.
This session is practical, honest, and grounded in lived experience. It is not about perfection or policy heavy solutions, but about building sustainable team norms that make space for difference while still delivering high quality work.
Attendees will leave with a clear framework for supporting neurodiverse teams, protecting manager wellbeing, and embedding inclusion into everyday studio operations.
Session Takeaway
How to support neurodivergent employees in a sustainable way that works in real production environments
How to protect manager wellbeing while fostering psychological safety and inclusion
How to move from individual accommodations to team level systems that scale
What common mistakes to avoid when supporting neurodiverse teams
Hiring for Success Under the New UK Employment Rights Act
The new UK Employment Rights Act represents one of the most significant shifts in employment protection in recent years, with shorter qualifying periods for unfair dismissal and increased scrutiny on hiring decisions. For employers, this means that recruitment mistakes will carry risk much earlier in the employment lifecycle.
This session explores how hiring processes must evolve to remain effective, defensible, and fair under the new legal landscape. Liz Prince will break down what the changes mean in practice for employers, particularly around selection criteria, interviews, probationary periods, and decision-making documentation.
Attendees will gain a clear understanding of why traditional informal or ‘culture-fit’ driven hiring approaches may no longer be sufficient, and how to build structured, evidence-based recruitment processes that reduce legal exposure while still supporting great hires. The session focuses on practical steps organisations can take now to future-proof their hiring, from redefining role requirements to improving assessment methods and record-keeping.
Designed for leaders, HR professionals, and hiring managers, this talk provides actionable guidance to help studios continue hiring with confidence in a tighter, faster-moving employment law environment.
Session Takeaway
- Understand how the new Employment Rights Act changes hiring risk and timelines.
- Learn how to structure recruitment and selection to reduce unfair dismissal exposure.
- Take away practical steps to improve interviews, assessments, and hiring records.
How to Work with your Ex Dev Partners to Resolve Blockers
Deadlines, insufficient documentation, repetitive feedback loops, and compressed timelines can all be avoided through effective communication, collaboration, and internal readiness. Join me as we walk through how to engage with our external partners in a meaningful way to resolve conflict when it arises.
Session Takeaway
- Learn how to effectively communicate with your vendors to get needs met.
- Emphasize listening to your vendors needs to come to resolution together.
- Learn how to resolve conflict through communication.
Product Validation: How to Spot a Flop Before it’s Too Late!
You have seen it a million times before. A game releases to crickets, and after the sad headlines, layoffs, and internal chaos, the employees say the same thing: "we should have seen this coming".
So what happened?
In this session we will go from start to end, conception to testing to production to ship, and build a framework of how to identify (and solve!) product issues BEFORE you ship. If you are releasing any sort of project in 2026 or beyond, this talk is sure to be useful.
Session Takeaway
After seeing this talk you can apply to your own project:
- A practical framework to define success at the project and feature level, so your development is always aligned and pointed towards the vision.
- Key insights on how to validate your project before its too late, how to playtest efficiently, how to not waste development figuring it out.
- A check list of warning signs to watch out for from announce to ship, so that your marketing is measurable and translates to actual sales.
Scaling Without Breaking Your Studio
As game studios grow, the biggest risks to performance and long-term value often shift away from the product itself and towards leadership capability, decision-making clarity, and how pressure is handled across the organisation.
This session explores the predictable pressure points that emerge as studios scale, and why many challenges attributed to hiring, process, or delivery are often symptoms of deeper leadership and system strain.
Drawing on experience across multiple growth-stage studios, the talk explores the inflection points where execution risk, attrition, and leadership overload tend to increase. It looks at why leadership capability often lags behind headcount growth, how decision bottlenecks and unclear accountability quietly erode value, and the hidden cost of pushing for growth without strengthening people and leadership systems.
The session also shares practical leadership shifts that support resilience, clarity, and sustainable performance under pressure.
This is a grounded, experience-led session for founders, studio leaders, and investors who want to reduce execution risk, protect long-term value, and support studios to scale responsibly in uncertain conditions.
Session Takeaway
Recognise early leadership and people risks as studios scale
Understand how leadership systems affect delivery and execution risk
Apply practical shifts to support sustainable performance
Tech Raises Money Better Than Games. Here’s Why
Games studios are creative powerhouses. But when it comes to raising investment, we consistently get it wrong - and we tend to get it wrong in the same ways.
Ella Romanos has spent 19 years in the games industry working as a developer, as a consultant advising studios on funding strategy, and most recently as a founder raising pre-seed for her own VC-backed startup. That last role was the one that finally showed her how badly the industry misunderstands what investors actually need.
This talk is an honest post-mortem on the assumptions games studios bring to the funding conversation - and why those assumptions cost us deals, credibility, and time. Ella will cover the mistakes she made herself, the patterns she observed in others, and the shift in mindset that changed how she pitches, plans, and thinks about proof.
Key topics include: why games studios confuse creativity with investment readiness; the vanity metrics trap and what investors actually want to see; the difference between proving a concept and proving demand; why the games industry thinks it's unique (it isn't); and what tech startups do differently that we should steal.
This is not a talk about how to write a pitch deck. It is a talk about why most of us are asking the wrong questions before we ever get to one.
Session Takeaway
1. Investors do not fund ideas, passion, or creative potential - they fund proof of demand. Understanding what proof means in your specific context is the work that needs to happen before you approach a single investor.
2. Most games studios are pitching the wrong thing. The game is not the investment case. The commercial model, customer validation, and evidence of repeatable demand are the investment case.
3. The games industry has far more to learn from the wider tech startup world than it typically acknowledges - especially on customer validation and building proof before scale.
4. Vanity metrics (wishlists, social follows, demo downloads) are not investor evidence. Knowing the difference between activity and traction will save you months of unproductive fundraising conversations.
5. You do not need to be far along to be investment ready - but you do need to be honest about where you are and what you have actually proven. Investors reward clarity and credibility over ambition alone.
The Power of Stopping: Spotting a Sunk Cost Fallacy Before it Sinks your Project
It's no great secret that projects overrun, that humans don't always make good plans and even when they do, they are inherently bad at spotting when plans are crumbling around them.
How do you stop the train when it’s obvious that your project or feature is overrunning? Game developers are often left feeling powerless to stop or course correct in the face of overrun because they don't have the tools to confidently identify what is going wrong. This talk explores the deeper reasons behind project failure and explains the psychological and behavioural reasons why teams miss warning signs. It will look at the folly of a sunk cost fallacy as well as demonstrate how to ignore the instinct to keep digging when things are already going south.
Although external factors can often derail a project, this talk will demonstrate the tools that Producers and the wider development team can utilise to help guide the team in creating achievable goals, pivot in the face of changing priorities but most importantly, highlight when a project is overshooting the mark so you can pull the plug before it's too late.
Session Takeaway
1) Show how to make Scope drift visible: Being clear on goals and priorities.
2) Recognising that Sunk cost is not a reason to continue: How to decide on future value.
3) How to ensure you have a “kill-switch” process: Ensuring you have a culture that can use it.
