Speaker Spotlight: Torsten Reil

Torsten Reil is co-founder and CEO of NaturalMotion. He holds a BA in Biology from Oxford University and an MSc in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems from Sussex University. Prior to founding NaturalMotion, Torsten was researching for a PhD in Complex Systems at Oxford University’s Zoology department, from which he spun off NaturalMotion. Torsten has been named amongst MIT’s TR100 global top innovators, Next-Gen’s 25 People in the Games Industry, Develop magazine’s 25 Game Changers, and has spoken at TED and TED Global.

At this year’s conference, Torsten will talk about ‘Rethinking Next-Gen’ – With every next-gen transition, developers and publisher have learnt how to retool their pipelines, adopt new technologies and deal with increased content requirements. But this time there’s a much bigger challenge ahead. Phones and tablets are the real next-gen, and for the first time, the games market is being disrupted across four distinct areas: business model, distribution, hardware and content. This talk will argue that the traditional console cycle is dead, and discuss what it takes to survive this disruption – and why it’s the biggest opportunity in gaming for over 20 years.

Speaker spotlight: Miles Jacobson

Miles Jacobson OBE is Studio Director of Sports Interactive, the team behind the best-selling Football Manager series, and creator of the original Championship Manager. This year Sports Interactive is celebrating it’s 20th birthday. At GameHorizon this year, Ian Livingstone will be having a cosy ‘fireside chat’ with Miles about some of his most memorable moments over the years.

If you have a question for Miles, tweet @gamehorizon with the hashtag #askMiles and Ian will ask a selection of the best on stage next week.

Sports Interactive was founded in 1994 by Paul and Oliver Collyer on the back of the success they’d achieved with a game they’d originally created in their Shropshire bedrooms in the late 1980s. That game was first published commercially in 1992 as Championship Manager. Miles first became involved Sports Interactive as a fan of the game, offering his services as one of the early testers.

Miles quickly became an integral part of the team, assuming the role of part-time Managing Director in 1999 before finally taking the helm on a full-time basis in 2001. Born in 1971 and raised in Watford, Miles began his career in the music business, working in the A&R department of Food Records. During his time in the music business (with Food and Polygram Island Music) Miles worked with a number of household names, including Jesus Jones, Dubstar, Shampoo, Blur, Feeder, Fat Boy Slim and The Bluetones. Under Miles’ management, Sports Interactive has grown from a fledgling start-up employing five people to one of the best-known names in UK game development with a staff of 84 and a network of more than 1,000 scouts across the globe. To date, the studio has sold in excess of 15 million games.

Outside Sports Interactive, Miles is heavily involved with a number of charitable organisations, including Warchild, GamesAid, Nordoff Robbins and Special Effect. A former Entrepreneur of the Year (London) finalist, Miles serves on the BAFTA steering committee for video games and the Develop conference steering committee. In 2011 Miles was awarded the OBE in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List for services to the gaming industry.

Special announcement: Michael Pachter

With less than a week to go to the GameHorizon Conference we have a special announcement. Michael Pachter will be joining us via Skype for an interview with conference host Charles Cecil.

Michael Pachter is an analyst at Wedbush Securities providing coverage of the Entertainment Software, Entertainment Retail and Movies and Entertainment sectors. Michael is also know for ‘Pach Attack’, a show hosted on GameTrailers.com where he answers questions submitted by users regarding the video game industry from a financial perspective.

Previously, Michael spent two years as the Director of Research at Wedbush Securities. Before joining Wedbush Securities, he served as the Director at Management Resource Center, a middle-market investment bank. Prior to that, Michael spent 15 years in various financial and management positions at Atlantic Richfield Company, most recently as Director of Strategic Planning.

Michael Pachter brings over 20 years of experience as a finance professional to Wedbush Securities. He has been recognized as StarMine’s Top Earnings Estimator year after year and Best on the Street by the Wall Street Journal. He holds an M.B.A. from the Anderson School at the University of California at Los Angeles, a juris doctor from Pepperdine University, an LL.M. in Taxation from the University of Florida, and a bachelor’s in Political Science from California State University, Northridge.

Speaker spotlight: David Reid

David Reid was appointed Chief Marketing Officer of CCP in January 2012, bringing more than a decade of video game marketing experience to the team.

He joined CCP from Trion Worlds, where as Senior Vice President of Publishing, he led the best-selling fantasy MMORPG RIFT to one million paid activations faster than any Western MMO in history. Prior to Trion, Reid was President of Publishing for NCsoft West, leading North American and European publishing across a portfolio of titles including Aion, Guild Wars, City of Heroes and Lineage.

Before NCsoft, he was Vice President of Marketing for Turner Broadcasting’s GameTap, and launched the Xbox 360 as Microsoft’s Director of Xbox Global Platform Marketing.

David will deliver a talk at the GameHorizon Conference this year entitled, ‘Return to the Core’ – Forty years after the first home videogame consoles were sold to consumers, our industry finds itself in a moment of dramatic change. Digital distribution, mobile and social games, and free to play/microtransaction business models continue to erode the familiar cycle of selling standalone games at premium price points in retail. Amidst the pattern of disappointing IPOs and financial troubles of high profile publishers, it would be easy to conclude the business of making premium games for gamers is dying out.

This talk will explore a different perspective: that the transition we are seeing now was wholly predictable, and the end result will be a return to the core, where the developers and publishers who create breakthrough, immersive experiences for the most demanding gamers will reap the greatest financial rewards.

One week to go!

With just over one week to go to the 2012 GameHorizon Conference, this is the last call! We still have some tickets left so please sign up soon to guarantee your place.

PRICE FREEZE!

We have frozen the ticket price at a rate of £275 +VAT. This ticket includes two days of speaker sessions, two parties, one BBQ and countless networking opportunities.

ONE DAY PASSES

We have a very limited number of one day passes for Wednesday 27th June. For a bargain cost of £125 + VAT, this ticket includes thewelcome party, one day of conference sessions and the main conference party. Contact elspeth.lawson@codeworks.net or call 0191 490 9156 for more details!

DISCOUNTS AVAILABLE

Additional discounts still apply for a number of organisations with prices at £225 + VAT. Sign up online at www.gamehorizonconference.com/tickets.

Participating companies include:

Chinwag – http://chinwag.com
Extended Play Festival – http://explay.co.uk
Game Republic – http://gamerepublic.net
GameHorizon – http://www.gamehorizon.net
IGDA – http://www.idga.org
Launch Conference – http://launchconference.co.uk
Pocketgamer – http://www.pocketgamer.biz
TIGA – http://www.tiga.org
UKIE – http://ukie.info

Contact your organisation for information on offers!

GameHorizon Networking BBQ

As the GameHorizon Conference sessions draw to a close at 1pm on Thursday 28th June, all delegates will head over to the stunning Baltic River Terrace for a networking BBQ sponsored by Thumbstar. The networking BBQ is your last chance to meet up and network with vital contacts over drinks and burgers!

We will have a staffed Business Exchange area where you can enquire about people you need to meet and leave business cards. Make sure you plan in advance and arrange meetings here beforehand so you can relax and enjoy the conference.

GREE sign up to GameHorizon Conference

We are pleased to announce that David McCarthy from the EMEA Developer Relations team at GREE has signed up to the GameHorizon Conference. GREE is Japan’s leading mobile social networking service, home to thousands of games and millions of users. And it’s going global, aiming to build the leading mobile social gaming ecosystem for users and developers worldwide.

David has over ten years of experience working in the videogame industry and has previously worked for Edge magazine, Rockstar games, and Salomon Smith Barney’s telecom and media investment banking team. He is also the author of Game On!: From Pong to Oblivion – The Greatest Video Games of All Time.

At the conference, David will talk to Charles Cecil in an interview about best practice and current trends in social mobile free-to-play. GREE is the world’s largest social gaming network with over 230 million users and is currently launching the GREE Platform – a social gaming ecosystem available to mobile users and developers all over the world. Having spent the past five years providing social games on mobile devices in Japan, GREE is well aware of some of the challenges – and the enormous creative and commercial potential – posed by this rapidly growing new area of gaming. So come and learn from one of the leaders in the ever evolving frontier territory of Social Mobile Free-to-Play.