Shuhei Yoshida, President of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios, has today been announced as the opening keynote speaker for this year’s Develop:Brighton conference and expo at the Hilton Brighton Metropole in July. Yoshida will also be awarded the Legend Award at the Develop Awards, organised by Future Publishing, on the evening of Wednesday 11 July.

A 25-year veteran of the games industry, Shuhei Yoshida is a renowned software developer having been part of PlayStation®’s immense and sustained success since its inception more than 20 years ago.

As part of the new three-day format, Yoshida will open Develop:Brighton on Tuesday 10 July with a fireside chat where he will share his perspective on a long and celebrated career from his start at Sony in the 1980s to joining the original PlayStation team two years ahead of its launch and overseeing the development of global best-selling franchises including God of War®, Grand Turismo®, The Last of Us™ and Uncharted™.

As well as a look back, during the keynote Yoshida will also talk about the mission of managing the worldwide studios and share his insight on Sony’s current success.

“We are delighted to welcome Shuhei Yoshida to Brighton this summer,” commented Andy Lane, managing director of Develop:Brighton organisers, Tandem Events. “Shuhei has a wealth of experience in developing world-renowned games and overseeing top class development studios which is hard to match. Looking back over his 20 years in games development, our delegates will have a fantastic opportunity to hear about the lessons learnt in forging a successful career from a man who was at the birth of the PlayStation and his insights into Sony’s current successes. I can’t think of anyone better to open this year’s conference.”

Develop:Brighton, Europe’s leading game developer conference and expo, will consist of eight tracks: Design; Art; Audio; Business; Coding; Evolve; Indie and Discoverability across a new three day format with the expo open on Wednesday and Thursday.

Other sessions already announced include:

[KEYNOTE] The Future of AI in Games Creation
Chet Faliszek, Bossa Studios

[BUSINESS] Five Stars – The Best Video Games of 2018 (so far)
Jordan Erica Webber, Games Journalist

[BUSINESS] Cryptocurrency in Gaming: Today and Tomorrow
Alex Amsel, Fig

[DISCOVERABILITY] Community Management in the Memeverse
Grace Carroll, Creative Assembly

[DISCOVERABILITY] Your Game Isn’t Going to Sell. Let’s See What We Can Do About That
Mike Rose, No More Robots

[EVOLVE] Artificial Stupidity to Killer Robots: The Evolution of AI
Ian Shaw, Games Technology Consulting

[EVOLVE] VR and Disability: An Overdue Love Story
Paolo Torelli, Programmer and UX Expert

[INDIE] Do Switch Quick, Get Rich Quick?
Tony Gowland, Ant Workshop

[INDIE] What To Do When That One Big Deal, Doesn’t Turn Into The Next Big Deal
Aj Grand Scrutton, Dlala Studios

[CODING] AI In Your Pocket: Character-Based Conversational Sims
Mitu Khandaker, Spirit AI

[CODING] Enhancing Your Game’s AI Using Unity Machine Learning Agents
Alessia Nigretti, Unity Technologies

[DESIGN] Design Workshop: Advanced Paper Prototyping
Dr. Mata Haggis-Burridge, NHTV

[DESIGN] Leveraging Culturalisation for Building Better Game Worlds
Kate Edwards, Geogrify

[AUDIO] Challenging Videogame Music Troops
Olivier Deriviere & James Hannigan, Composers

[AUDIO] Horizon Zero Dawn™ – Dealing with Scope and Scale in a Brand New Open World
Bastian Seelbach, Guerrilla Games

[ART] Solving an Invisible Problem: Designing for Colour-Blindness
Douglas Pennant, Creative Assembly

[ART] Physically Based Workflows Explained
Claudia Doppioslash, Contafoe

Registration is live for Develop:Brighton, with Early Bird tickets on sale until 6 June at www.developconference.com.

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Note to editors:
Ravi Vijh or Dean Barrett
Bastion
+44 (0)20 3841 7660
ravi@bastion.co.uk/dean@bastion.co.uk

About Develop:Brighton conference & expo

The Develop:Brighton conference is where the European developer community comes together to learn from each other and share experiences, be inspired by world renowned experts and gurus, get up-to-date with the latest development tools and techniques, make new contacts and catch up with old ones.

With a programme that is shaped by some of the industry's key figures, the conference touches all levels of the development community from the largest studios to the smallest indies; from development directors to programmers.

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PlayStation, God of War and Gran Turismo are registered trademarks, and Horizon Zero Dawn, The Last of Us and Uncharted are all trademarks of Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc All other marks property of their respective owners.