After 30+ years in the games industry and with over 120 games created and launched, how do you manage the ups and downs of that journey?  By signing amazing games, building franchises, transforming a business, helping build the studios of tomorrow - to taking the UK stock market by storm by quadrupling share prices within 2 years and winning entrepreneur of the year of the UK AIM stock market in 2020. And as one of the only female founders of a games listed company in the world today - by putting gaming first!

Hutch is a London-based free-to-play studio specialising in car games on mobile including F1 Clash, Top Drives and Rebel Racing. In December 2020 it was acquired by MTG Group for an expected $375M.  CEO Shaun Rutland talks to David Amor, who has his own experiences of company acquisitions, and speaks openly and honestly about the motivations behind the sale, the process of the sale itself and the changes experienced on the other side. They will offer real-world tips and war stories to help you prepare your studio for acquisition.

• An understanding of the mechanics of selling a games business.

• Typical deal structures when a company is acquired.

• Establishing a fair outcome for the people in your team.

• How to hang on during a rollercoaster of emotions.

Ian and Luke will talk about equity funding options available to games studios looking to expand or scale up their businesses. They will cover seed, angel and venture capital, explaining the benefits and suitability of each type. They will also advise on how studios should make themselves 'investor-ready' for when funders begin their pre-investment due diligence. Delegates will have a better understanding of what investors look for when making investment decisions and also have a clearer idea on how to present to potential investors. They will also learn about how investors bring more than just money to the table.

Learn about various types of funding and how equity partnerships work A better understanding of investors Learn how to present to investors

In this presentation, you'll be given some background covering the thought process behind the release planning of a new AAA IP. Delving into why it is necessary to create alignment and work towards a unified cadence, and how to build a framework that can be fed into and iterated upon over time. Adam will discuss kicking off development, measuring health regularly, utilising tools such as Jira, reporting, closing, and finally, going live. He will cover what worked, what didn’t work, and how the processes were revised following feedback, leading to a more stable, successful framework.

Takeaway:

• Knowledge of building a release framework to fit your milestones
• How to foster regular deliveries and the steps involved
• Different approaches to track and report on deliverables and progress, dependency tracking, and ultimately creating a package for your release

Industry veteran Ted Price, the president and founder of Insomniac Games, answers questions about Insomniac’s approach to game development in an increasingly unpredictable world.

Insomniac has been creating best-selling games for over 27 years including Spyro the Dragon, the long-running Ratchet & Clank series and Marvel’s Spider-Man. More recently Insomniac has released Marvel’s  Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart for the PS5.

Discover what's coming up for the UK games industry through this informative talk. We'll discuss how the industry negotiated the Covid crisis, where the industry is today and what needs to happen for it to keep growing strong (and with support from the wider world).

• A clear understanding of the current standing of the UK games industry today.
• Knowledge of the major challenges that the industry is facing and ideas on how to negotiate them.
• Discovery of the opportunities the sector can seize at local, national and international level.

What if? What if we could take our company culture from good to great? What if we could do that in a pandemic where people aren’t working side by side, but thrown into a world of isolation? What if we could build a system which wouldn’t only support us during this time, but create opportunities for our hybrid future? These were the questions Sumo wanted to answer as the company, like so many others, was forced to deal with enormous change in a very short space of time. Sumo’s goal has always been to create incredible products that inspire a sense of wonder, but achieving that together requires teams to feel connected, developed and nurtured.

• How to build a culture through social learning
• How technology can strengthen company culture 
• How to empower a bottom up company culture

With over 27 years of experience in games as a geographer and culturalization strategist, Kate Edwards has seen it all when it comes to geopolitical and cultural challenges that may be overlooked in game creation and can negatively impact a title’s release overseas. As more governments now extend their content policies beyond their borders, we’re seeing a sharp increase in content being rejected for not adhering to a single worldview. In this new talk, Kate discusses what game creators can do to be better prepared for defending your creative vision against intrusive local regulations.

Attendees will gain a deeper understanding of how to create a content defense strategy, and be more forward-thinking about how their game content may be compatible or incompatible with specific markets. In particular, this talk will help equip creators with a framework for how to proactively develop a comprehensive reaction strategy that ties directly to their individual/company values. As a result, if/when an issue ever arises in a specific market about their creative choices, they will be fully prepared for a response.

At Darewise, we aim to modernize the game development process for our game-as-a-service: Life Beyond. To support a rapid iteration and release schedule while the game is still under heavy development, we have had to adapt our studio culture and our development processes to match.  In this talk, we will focus on the programming aspect, on how to create, foster, and preserve a high-quality-code culture that results in a healthy, robust, and modular codebase that is resilient to design changes and could easily be reused for other games. We will cover the specific programming practices (best practices, code reviews, DevOps, management of technical debt...) as well as the equally important human aspects of management, hiring, knowledge sharing, and project planning methodologies we use. 

• Best practices on how to increase rapid iteration in heavy development while maintaining/creating a high-quality culture (considering the hot button topic of crunch)

Oddworld: Soulstorm’s journey began in 2014 as the team was finishing up Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty and ventured its way toward a next-gen push, assisted by Unity’s high-fidelity visuals, but it all ended up teetering on a technical moonshot to bring it all home…and that’s just the beginning.

• How and which partnerships to build when creating a game
• Learn about successes and failures when developing for both previous and next generation consoles
• How to handle a challenging release and re-release a game, both internally and externally with the community

When Konami Digital Entertainment Europe’s new Production Team set out to create a PC and console development and publishing business, it had to answer some fundamental questions. Questions such as what games does it want to make and how do they fit into the wider KONAMI portfolio?

This talk will offer an insight into how Konami Digital Entertainment Europe set out to shape its future by looking to the past. We will explore how the new business looked at classic KONAMI games to understand what gives them their enduring legacy in the minds of gamers. We will look at the common threads that run through those games and how those threads direct our decision making when looking for studios and projects to work with.

When looking at a potential project or partner we are always asking does this game have that DNA running through it, does it fit into the historic portfolio? Better still, is it pushing that DNA in new and exciting ways?

Every publisher is different. Every publisher has its own criteria when looking at projects. It’s important that studios remember this when pitching. Try to understand what that publisher is looking for and how your game might fit with them. Hopefully this talk will give an idea of the criteria Konami Digital Entertainment Europe has in mind when reviewing a new project and offer food for thought when pitching to any publisher.

• Understand your game's DNA and how you can align it with the publisher's DNA
• Discover how Konami Digital Entertainment Europe's new Production Team was established, what criteria matters to them and what mistakes they made along the way

Children today are spending more time online than ever before, and a huge part of that time is spent gaming. Headlines regularly shout about children spending hundreds of pounds on Fortnite skins or Robux – but what drives these decisions and where does the value lie for the youngest audiences?

Jelena and Raj present findings from a study of children and parents’ attitudes towards in-gaming spending, exploring how gaming motivations impact the decision-making process and what type of in-game spenders exist in this audience. They also present the up-to-date thinking on the ethics of monetising children’s games, as well as design implications of the audience drivers and attitudes.

In between research, strategy and application – they discuss how we build games for children – ethically, commercially and to delight.

• What drives children's spending within games, and how games can be monetised ethically and effectively for this audience
• How gamer motivations impact in-game spending
• Parents' and children's role in gaming decision making
• Design decisions that cause delight and those that frustrate children and youth