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With the big GDC Europe 2016 August conference in Germany just around the corner, organizers want you to know that show attendees will have a chance to catch a great talk from Hi-Rez Studios exec Todd Harris about how the studio succeeded when it went all in on eSports with its popular MOBA Smite.

Harris is chief operating officer at Hi-Rez, and in his talk "Smite & HiRezTV: Going All in on Video and eSports for Community Growth and Retention" he'll explain how the company used video content marketing and eSports to help grow Smite to over 20 million players.

Video marketing required only a small budget to get started but has since scaled to large event broadcasts with multi-million dollar budgets, according to Harris. To wit, attendees of his talk will walk away with a better understanding of video content marketing and how it shapes a game as an eSport.

Furthermore, they'll gain insights on the importance of using video to market their own games or identifying publishing partners who use video to grow and retain community. Don't miss it!

To better understand the state of the European game industry ahead of GDC Europe, Game Developers Conference officials have surveyed over 800 European games industry professionals who have attended a past GDC event.

The data gathered from that survey has now been compiled into the fourth annual GDC Europe State of the Industry report, and it offers both an interesting snapshot of the European game industry as it stands now and some perspective on how it has changed over the past year.

Yesterday, we shared some highlights from the report that showcased how PC and mobile still reign as the top platforms European developers make games for -- but interest in VR is rising fast.

Today, we dig even deeper into the survey results and share some data on how respondents feel about the perennially popular topic of tax incentives for game development in Europe.

In an effort to better understand the state of the European game industry ahead of GDC Europe, Game Developers Conference officials have surveyed over 800 European games industry professionals who have attended a past GDC event.

The data gathered from that survey has been compiled into the fourth annual GDC Europe State of the Industry report, and it offers both an interesting snapshot of the European game industry as it stands now and some perspective on how it has changed over the past year.

Rising interest in VR game development, especially for the HTC Vive, deepening concern about crowdsourced funding and a growing focus on releasing games for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are among the notable trends outlined by the findings from this year’s survey.

We've taken the liberty of summarizing some of those notable highlights below. You can register to download the full report at the GDC Europe State of the Industry hub.

With GDC Europe 2016 just around the corner, you should know that conference organizers have lined up a great talk from Space Ape Games cofounder Simon Hade about how you can support your mobile game with live ops and events -- without tying up a lot of people.

Hade's talk, "Forget Features! How Space Ape Grows Games Through Live Ops & Events," will be part of the Business, Marketing and Management track of talks at GDC Europe next month in Cologne, Germany.

According to Hade, Space Ape (Rival Kingdoms, Samurai Siege) is a 100-person studio -- yet only a handful of people are working on their live games. In the course of his talk he'll show you how they continue to grow revenue month over month through sophisticated live operations that allow designers, product managers and other non-technical team members to keep the game fresh with new content, troops, defenses and event types every week -- with little to no developer support.

What in-app purchasing strategies set the top mobile game makers apart from the pack?

Amazon developer evangelist Mike Hines will answer that question at GDC Europe next month in Germany, where he'll take the stage to deliver a talk on "What Top Apps Do With IAP That the Rest Don't."

Amazon has collected data about how mobile game players engage with IAP and reviewed how the most profitable apps are using IAP to monetize successfully. As a result, Hines plans to share two levels of data: how the top 50 did differently (Retention data, session length data, units sold and price data) and what they did differently to get those results.

It turns out there are a handful of things that most of the top 50 do that other games don't. Hines will share that knowledge -- along with a truckload of actionable data -- with attendees of his GDC Europe 2016 session. Don't miss it!

This year's big GDC Europe conference in Germany is right around the corner, and organizers have been working hard to line up an excellent array of cutting-edge sessions and speakers for the August event.

To that end, today GDC Europe officials are proud to confirm that Kayla Kinnunen, game director at Roadhouse Interactive, will be leading a smart session on how to best design humane, intuitive virtual- and augmented-reality experiences.

Her talk, "No Text, No Tutorial: Fully Embracing Human-Centered Design in VR," will showcase how VR -- especially tracked-controller VR -- demands a dramatic shift in UX (User Experience) development practices.

Many common UX constructs were built for a 2D screen and don't work in three dimensional space. At first glance this can present a huge challenge to VR developers. However, with careful thought, this change opens up whole new interaction models that are more intuitive and natural for players. Kinnunen's talk will review trailblazers in the field; discuss human-centered design principles and explain how to take these principles further in your own projects.