Tim Sweeney will speak at GamesBeat Next in virtual talk on the path to the open metaverse

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 that Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, maker of the Unreal Engine and Fortnite, will be a special guest virtual speaker.

I will do a virtual fireside chat with Sweeney about the path to the open metaverse. Sweeney began telling me about this dream of the metaverse back in 2015 for sure and even earlier. But the road to the metaverse has been decades in the making, ever since Neal Stephenson, sci-fi author and one of our speakers, published his novel Snow Crash in 1992. Stephenson will be a speaker at our event in person this time, but alas Sweeney will only be attending as a virtual guest through a recorded interview. How’s that for some metaphysical twists on the metaverse?

Lately, the metaverse has fallen off track. The revival began during the pandemic, when we couldn’t go outside or meet with each other. Then it peaked in 2021 when Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook as Meta. And then resistance to the idea of a closed metaverse began. Stephenson himself cofounded Lamina1 in 2022 to promote the open metaverse. And while the metaverse hype has cooled off, people are still trying to make it happen, on the enterprise side with digital twins and games like Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024.

I’ll be talking with Sweeney about the progress toward the open metaverse, and why open platforms are critical for it to exist. It will be a good way to kick off a conversation about technology that matters to games at GamesBeat Next.

But that’s not all. It’s a momentous time for all of the game engine makers, who are key to our core audience of game developers and decision makers. I can talk about all of our new speakers here but there will be time for more posts and I thought I should just mention a few.

We’ll also hear in person from Matthew Bromberg, CEO of Unity. His task is to regain the trust of game developers — a path made very tough after a disastrous price increase last year that angered game makers. Bromberg, who has been on the job just a few months, rectified that move by canceling the controversial price increase based on usage and then he replaced it with a more predictable increase. He is also pledging stability and performance for the company’s next product, the Unity 6 game engine.

And we will hear in person from Juan Linietsky, cofounder of W4 Games, the proponent of the alternative open source game engine Godot. Linietsky is the creator of the Godot Engine, for which he served as technical lead adviser for over a decade. He is a veteran entrepreneur in the game industry. Beyond Godot, Linietsky has founded multiple companies for game development and tech services since the 1990s. Linietsky has an opportunity to grow open source’s role in game development.

Both Bromberg and Linietsky will speak in person at the event, along with an all-star cast of leaders of the game industry. We’re grateful in these tough times to bring gaming leaders back together in the GamesBeat community.

Much to look forward to

I am looking forward to the collection of voices that we have for this event. We’re adding to it every day and are seeking to put together diverse voices and perspectives so that we can make this the most efficient and inspiring event for gaming.

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.

These speakers 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.

A welcoming place

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

Amy Hennig, co-president of new media at 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.

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; Kerestell 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.

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. But it’s still tough. 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, Ludeo 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.