GDC Europe Debuts Sony, Playdom, Crytek Talks, Transmedia Focus
GDC Europe organizers have announced major new speakers for the August event taking place in Cologne alongside Gamescom, with notables from Sony, Playdom, Crytek and Playfish speaking on social games, budget balancing, game metrics controversy and beyond.
Following the recent announcement of a keynote from browser game giant and Battlestar Galactica MMO creator Bigpoint, the new sessions reveal significant breadth to the leading European video game conference, which takes place on August 16th-18th in Cologne, Germany.
Some of the notable new speakers for the conference include the following:
- In 'Intuition vs. Metrics: The Big Debate', Playfish's Jeferson Valardes will explore the controversy about the social game space's metrics-driven approach to design and development. Valardes, at the Electronic Arts-owned leading social network game firm (Restaurant City, Pet Society), promises "take this controversial subject by the neck and leave no stone unturned" in discussing it.
- Crytek producer Bernd Diemer (Crysis) is presenting a thought-provoking design lecture from the leading German firm, 'Imaginary Places, Strange Maps, and How Pop Culture Resonates Past Media Borders', discussing how inspiration for games can be taken from the strange, compelling miasma of pop culture through our earliest experiences.
- In a key production track lecture from Seb Canniff of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, 'Budgets - The Bermudan Part of the Production Triangle', the SCEE manager will provide hands-on advice on how to build, track and stick to a video game project budget, looking at "what most often goes wrong, and providing tools and tips on how to avoid these pitfalls".
