Respawn - Gathering of Game Developers 2015

How to prepare to a Kickstarter camapign; How to plan out a campaign; How to run a campaign (updates, shoutouts, crossmarketing, social media, interviews); What went wrong/right with 'Warlocks vs Shadows' KS campaign (reward tiers, video atmosphere etc.); When runing a KS campaign can backfire;

According to research more diverse teams have been found to be more effective and productive than others. (i.e. McKinsey, Catalyst) At the same time research reflects what you might expect – a vast majority of game developers are white men, aged between 20 and 35 typically, and very few have children.
The session wants to examine the status quo of the games industry with regards to it’s diversity and discuss some proposals which are typically suggested by academia for the way forward.

Our 70s heisting simulator went through Steam Greenlight and Early Access, culminating in its release in the beginning of June. We built the game "out in the open", sharing stuff we worked on actively and doing our best to involve the community. This is a post mortem of that experience, with focus on how we handled building, involving and managing the community.

Since launching in 2014 we’ve helped almost 50 teams build an audience and get feedback for their game ideas; and supported teams through Kickstarter helping them to raise over $600,000 in the process. We’ve learned a lot, and we’d like to share some of that stuff with you – how we’ve tweaked our approach to campaigns to get the best results, suggestions for pitch optimisation, how to approach media, how to set targets, and more. If you’re thinking about pitching to the crowd, or even to publishers, this might help.

It seemed to us that players and reviewers had the wrong expections from our game Team Indie, when we first released it. We tried to find out about player expectations and experience after releasing your game to know how we could have improved and what were the biggest problems with the game and campaign. I specifically look at some of the decissions we made before releasing the game and analyse with different methods, if we should have done it differently. - Examining players experience and expectations with a custom survey campaign, before and after playing the game - Analysing which of the characters in our game were actually known and how that influenced the release - Looking at the cross marketing to see what went right and what went wrong - Did our trailer focus on the right things? - What did journalist think and why didn't they report or why did they report in a negative way?

Playful Oasis is a collective of passionate indie developers. The goal of the group is to bring together nature themed games from around the world under one brand. This talk addresses the difficulty to get the word out about your indie game and the strategy we (a bunch of developers) came up with to be heard. We'll mostly focus on the sites concept (developers can join with their games free of any charge and then use the site freely to blog, post about their Kickstarter, write about related topics,...) and give an insight of the pros and cons of this concept.

The current situation in mobile gaming is very diverse. Currently mobile retention and acquisition companies contribute by retaining the mobile audiences and managing a mobile community. Some argue, that the golden times of f2p mobile gaming is going to end. Will there be only premium mobile games ? Or will the changes be more profound ? Platform changes are usually the strongest interrupters in the game markets. We have seen the steady growth of mobile as a gaming platform. Many developers, who did not imagine this 5 years ago develop today only for this platform. But where is the next level ? Does mobile just reinvent itself and after mobile follows mobile again or do other platforms like consoles or interfaces like VR change the game. Or do the new VOD platforms play a role, when they open more and more for games ?

This panel will discuss experiences and lessons learnt in Early Access – which approaches to take in communications upfront and during launch, when to go for Early Access and when not, what to expect when going for it and which best practices everyboday learnt and would advise on in general.

As more and more companies employ some form of agile development, good communication within the team is more important than ever. While there are numerous elements that affect the flow of information, politics and power plays in the company tend to be more disruptive than anything else and can be the root of many problems. As part of the session the speakers will talk about scientific findings on the topic and their implications. Among other things, it'll be about information and know how not built, transferred, or applied properly as the consequence of office politics.