Speakers

Raoul Barbet

Dontnod Entertainment / Capsule Animation Studio
Creative Director & Music Supervisor - Life is Strange / Film Director

Raoul is a videogame and animated film director living in France. After studying engineering, Raoul Barbet specialized himself in cultural and audiovisual fields, working in France, Canada and Cambodia. After several experiences in the industry (Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain, Illumination Mac Guff’s The Lorax), he finally joined Dontnod Entertainment.
He’s the co-creator and creative director of Life is Strange 1 & 2 and The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit. In parallel, he has cofounded in 2016 a new animation studio in Paris: Capsule Animation Studio. It is specialized in high quality CGI images, trailers, VFX, videoclips…
He’s now working on new projects in game and film industry, always interested in new partnerships and great stories to tell.

Michael Schade

ROCKFISH Games
CEO & Co-Founder

Michael is a serial entrepreneur, marketing & PR expert, and seasoned speaker with more than 25 years of experience in the CGI and video games industry. Together with his long-term business partner Christian Lohr, he founded ROCKFISH Games, an independent PC and console games studio, headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, in 2014. With their seasoned team behind the critically acclaimed Galaxy on Fire series onboard, the former mobile games veterans had a major surprise hit with their new studio debut EVERSPACE, which sold over one million copies so far. Funded through yet another successful Kickstarter, EVERSPACE 2 is already in the making.

Cy Wise

absurd:joy
Founder and Live Raccoon

Cy is the one and only “Founder and Live Raccoon” at absurd:joy and manages the collection of curious humans who are focused on XR and play. With 15+ years of games industry tenure, Cy has most recently helped to run and grow VR game studio Owlchemy Labs, creators of award winning Job Simulator and Rick and Morty: VR. Her expertise spans VR design, human-centric play, and building / maintaining culture within orgs and communities. When left unattended, she writes jokes and dialog for all of her projects. Before VR rocked her world, she survived AAA MMO game development mostly unscathed. Before that, Cy once started a scooter gang. Cy also was once hired to “tell the CEO when they’re doing things wrong”. She did just that and regrets nothing. Cy is also made 92% of knives, with the remaining 8% being a mix of raccoons and water.

Justin Truman

Bungie
Production Director

Justin Truman is a multidisciplinary game developer and leader with 17 years of experience and 8 shipped titles across PC and Consoles.  He has spent the last 10 years at Bungie working on the award-winning Destiny Franchise and contributing in a variety of roles – as an Engineering Lead, Design Director, and most recently as the Production Director of Destiny 2’s Live Services.

Brian Fargo

inXile Entertainment
CEO

Brian has been in the games business since its infancy having founded Interplay Entertainment in 1983. Interplay became a top 5 PC games publisher in the mid 90’s having produced some of the biggest franchises of all time including Bard’s Tale, Wasteland, and Fallout. Interplay also helped to launch the careers of some of the biggest developers such as Blizzard, Bioware, and Treyarch. Mr. Fargo formed inXile entertainment in 2002 and has released Wasteland 2, Torment: Tides of Numenera and Bard’s Tale 4 since then. His most recent project, Wasteland 3, is just being completed and to be shipped out in May of 2020. inXile was recently acquired by Microsoft Games and is now part of their first party studios.

Tero Virtala

Remedy Entertainment
CEO

Tero Virtala is the CEO of Remedy Entertainment. Previously he spent 12 years building and running the Finnish video games development studio Redlynx. During his tenure, the studio created the global hit franchise Trials. Ubisoft bought Redlynx in 2011. After spending a few years as a consultant to some of the world’s leading video game studios, Tero joined Remedy in 2016 as the CEO. Remedy Entertainment employs over 260 professional and is working on four projects with the most recent being the critically-acclaimed Control.

Steve Escalante

Versus Evil
General Manager / Founder

Steve Escalante is the General Manager and founder of independent games publisher, Versus Evil. An industry veteran with 20 years of game development and publishing experience, Escalante started his own indie development team in 1999. Prior to starting Versus Evil, he also held several VP and Director level positions with the most notable as Director of Marketing for five years at Bethesda Softworks. In 2017, Escalante also started Red Cerberus, a services company focused on quality assurance, compliance, localization and porting games. With main operations in Brazil, Red Cerberus has experienced strong success with over 85 team members and growing. Notable titles launched with Versus Evil to date include the award winning, Banner Saga franchise, Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, Antihero, Guild of Dungeoneering, Yaga and more.

Paweł Rohleder

Techland
CTO

A highly experienced developer, manager and video games enthusiast who is keen on new technologies. Right now, working on shared technology for two amazing AAA unannounced titles @ Techland. Over 16 years in the game development industry, of which the last 13 years are with Techland (Dying Light, Dead Island, Call of Juarez). Paweł currently manages a team of 80+ professionals developing cutting-edge technology for games across multiple platforms. Is crazy about synergy between technology, science, business and art – and even did a PhD to prove such synergy exists. Loves new challenges and taking on “the impossible”.

Victor Kislyi

Wargaming
CEO

A big history buff, huge chess fan and an avid gamer, Victor Kislyi is a co-founder and CEO of Wargaming. He established the company in 1998, one year before graduating from university with a degree in physics. Over 20 years, Wargaming has shipped over 20 titles, taking the world by storm in 2010 with the release of World of Tanks, which has become one of the leaders in the free-to-play MMO market.

Today as the company’s CEO, Victor leads the team, setting strategy and continually evolving Wargaming with his experience and enthusiasm.

Dan Luffey

Freelance
Translator

Dan is a translator with over ten years of experience in the game industry. After translating novels and manga, he transitioned over to the game industry and has localized a variety of Japanese games into English, including “Dragon Ball FighterZ” and “The MISSING: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories.” Aside from translation, Dan also interprets for Japanese creators at events around the world, has served as a localization manager for indie games, and is writing the story for an indie game that should be released very soon.

Andrew Vaughan

Dolby
Content Relations

Andy Vaughan works in content relations for Dolby Developer, helping developers (from independent to AAA) deliver Dolby Atmos-enabled titles for PC and Xbox. Based in Dolby’s San Francisco headquarters, he works in a larger Consumer Entertainment Group that helps advance the science of sight and sound in the cinema, at home, and on-the-go.

Neil Holmes

ID@Xbox
Developer Partner Manager

Neil is an industry veteran with 30 years in the games industry, as programmer, producer and technical manager. He has helped develop a diverse range of titles from independent games, to F2P mobile hits and AAA console games. In his current role as a Developer Partner Manager for ID@Xbox in EMEA Neil assists developers across Europe to bring their games to Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Windows 10.

Petr Kolar

Bohemia Interactive
Project Lead

Petr started his career in game development on the other side of the barricades – as a gaming journalist for a Czech webzine Doupe.cz. Then he took an Arrowhead to the knee and joined Bohemia Interactive for Arma 2: British Armed Forces DLC as an Encoder. He started leading the Encoding team on Arma 3 and took over Arma 3: Apex expansion as a Project Lead. Arma 3 based even a standalone free-to-play shooter Argo where he led the transition to live-ops. This changed his focus to free-to-play completely as he took over Xbox One exclusive shoot’n’loot Vigor. He is now wondering on how to get the project to live-ops mode after the release last year.

Benoit Houle

BioWare
Director of Product Development

Benoit Houle is a Director of Product Development at BioWare. He is an experienced leader with more than 20 years of managing software multidisciplinary teams. Benoit started is game. industry career when he took a position of Principal Project Manager for the Dragon Age franchise in 2006. In this capacity, Benoit helped to redefine the software development framework and practices and team structure. He was promoted to Director of Production in 2012 and managed all project managers and producers in both Edmonton and Montreal studios. Benoit is now the Director of Product Development for un-announced projects.

Doug North Cook

Chatham University
Professor & Researcher

Doug is a designer, professor, and researcher focused on VR&AR, experience design, and accessibility. He is the founding faculty for the Immersive Media programs at Chatham University, lead instructor for the Immersive Design Residencies at Fallingwater, and is in production on multiple new VR projects including museum installations, game projects, and social interaction research. Doug has also beat all 20 ascension levels in Slay the Spire – but only with Defect.

Graham McAllister

Independent

Graham is the creator of SYNC, a framework for turning ‘Good’ teams into ‘World-class’ teams. SYNC is a series of 8 templates which provides teams with a process for agreeing on the vision of the game, track how well the vision has been executed, and aligns the vision with the target audience. Previously he was the Founder of Player Research which was acquired by Keywords Studios in 2016.

Alex Schwartz

absurd:joy
Founder and Janitor

Alex is the “Founder and Janitor” at absurd:joy, a VR/AR venture focused on building magical new ways for humans to interact with technology. Previously, Alex founded, built, and ran the Google-acquired VR game studio Owlchemy Labs. He led the creation of the award winning titles Job Simulator and Rick and Morty: VR. His passion for design, art, and engineering led him to a role where he did just about everything until he managed to hire someone better to take it off his plate, hence ‘janitor’. When not advising GDC, DICE, and BAFTA, Alex is probably playing some kind of non-athletic fringe sport such as juggling, billiards, table tennis, and betting friends he can throw that crumpled piece of paper in that trash can 20ft away (and other similar pastimes covered on ESPN 8).

Lana Zgombic

Bossa Studios
Producer

Lana is a producer at Bossa Studios currently working on Surgeon Simulator 2, an electrifying sequel to the 2013 hit of the same name. Throughout her career Lana successfully shipped titles on all major platforms and although she started in publishing, she soon moved into in house development where she used both experiences to morph into the go-to producer for any multi platform projects. Lana’s has also been honored with a few notable recognitions such as MCV’s 30 Under 30 and gamesindustry.biz Top 100 Future Talent. Most recently, she became a Limit Break mentor for unrepresented genders aiming to empower anyone wishing to work in production.

Michael Cheung

Makers Fund
General Partner

Michael is a partner at Makers Fund, a venture capital fund dedicated to backing founders globally in the gaming industry. Makers has invested in 47 companies to date across Europe, North America and Asia. Prior to being part of the founding team at Makers Fund, Michael was a Senior Director at Tencent and before that spent his career advising Gaming and Internet companies on growth, global expansion and strategy. He also spent his younger years on a short (and failed!) stint as a semi-professional Counter Strike 1.6 player.

Xinyu Qian

Outfit7
CEO

As the CEO of Outfit7 Limited, Xinyu Qian is responsible for running all facets of the company’s global business in service of its mission to deliver fun to every home in the world. Since joining Outfit7 three years ago, Xinyu has been energized by the dynamic nature of the mobile gaming industry. His passion and vision is to expand Outfit7’s scope, driving the company to new heights while continuing to deliver fun to hundreds of millions of players, viewers and fans around the world.

Marc-André De Blois

Panache Digital
Senior Game Designer

Marc-André began his career in 1997 and worked at Ubisoft as a Game Designer on Hype: The Time Quest, Lead Designer on Batman: Vengeance and later on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. He then took a ten-year break from the industry to get a Master of Laws and worked as a Public Notary for a short period of time. In 2012, he came back to his first love, crafting games, as part of the development team of 1666: Amsterdam with Patrice Désilets. When Panache Digital games, an independent Montreal-based studio, was founded in 2014, Marc-André was one of the first to join the ranks as Senior Game Designer on Ancestors: The Humankind Kind Odyssey.

Tamara Milenković

Ekipa2 part of Outfit7 Group
HR Director

Tamara is an HR partner with extensive experience at the frontline of game production.
Having worked as a game artist across more than 20 games earlier in her career, she’s the perfect person to take care of the HR needs of the product and art teams at Outfit7 Group. Whether she’s running eSports tournaments, organizing zombie walks, or providing day-to-day HR support to game production teams, Tamara’s people-focussed approach ensures that everyone else can focus on productivity, creativity and, above all, games!

Renee Gittins

IGDA
Executive Director

Renee is the Executive Director of the IGDA, and a multi-disciplinary leader with expertise in software engineering and creative direction. She is a passionate advocate and connector for developers and diversity in the game industry, with a background that spans across engineering, design, and production. She is outspoken about initiatives to increase diversity both within the game industry and gaming overall to help the game industry grow and improve for everyone.

Anya Combs

Kickstarter
Director of Games Outreach

Anya Combs is the Director of Games Outreach at Kickstarter. She has been in the digital games space for over a decade, and worn many hats in production, development, and community management. She has overseen multiple mobile and online titles launched for Nickelodeon & AddictingGames, and has worked with countless game creators launching successful projects on Kickstarter. She loves working with game devs and helping them in any cycle of their development process. When she’s not helping game developers, Anya is a saxophone player in NYC. You might find her playing on the streets of Manhattan or Brooklyn.

Hendrik Lesser

remote control productions / EGDF
CEO / President

Serial entrepreneur Hendrik is well known as CEO of the international production house remote control productions and President of the European Game Developers Federation. After starting out in the industry as a Producer and Product Manager he has been building a family of independent development studios throughout Europe for over 13 years, which today consists of 13 teams in five countries with more than 270 passionate game makers. Hendrik is also a co-founder and Executive Producer of Chimera Entertainment, the 60 heads strong development studio behind the AAA mobile productions Angry Birds Evolution and Angry Birds Epic (100+ million downloads) and a yet to be announced title. Besides his roles as CEO and producer, Hendrik also is an avid lobbyist for the political and academic acceptance of video games as goods of cultural value.

Teddy Dief

Independent
Writer, Director

Director and Designer of the palm tree project, partnered with Kowloon Nights. Teddy co-designed award-winning RPG Hyper Light Drifter. Former Creative Director at Square Enix Montréal, designer at Disney and game narrative researcher at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Co-founder of Los Angeles arts collective Glitch City – a hub for the gamemaking community. Teddy hosted and produced events such as the Chocobowl charity livestream, IndieCade Innovation Awards, and Idle Thumbs Playscape podcast. Their work explores narrative systems, love, and creative life on the internet.

Mike Bithell

Freelancer
Writer, Director

Mike Bithell began as a designer and design lead in the games industry in the 2000s, before launching his breakout rectangle game in 2012 and escaping to independent development with his own remote studio. Over seven years, Bithell Games have shipped a number of successful games. Our most famous is Thomas Was Alone, a BAFTA winning minimalist platforming game, we produced a critically and commercially successful stealth action game called Volume, collaborated with Google on EarthShape for their VR hardware and created the Circular series of short science fiction story games. We recently completed the well received video game adaptation of our favourite action movie, John Wick Hex, in collaboration with Lionsgate and Good Shepherd Entertainment.

Chris Remo

Valve
Game Designer, Composer, Writer

Chris Remo is a game designer, composer, and writer at Valve. He was a key creative contributor as game designer, composer, and audio director on Firewatch at Campo Santo. Previously, he worked in multidisciplinary roles on games including Battlefront II: X-Wing VR, The Cave, Gone Home, Thirty Flights of Loving, BioShock Infinite and more, independently and with Criterion Games, Double Fine Productions, and Irrational Games. Chris also co-founded the podcast network Idle Thumbs, where he has hosted and produced several popular podcasts.

Christina Seelye

CEO
Modus / Maximum Games

Christina is the CEO of indie video game publisher Modus Games and its parent company Maximum Games. Christina founded Maximum Games in 2009, bootstrapped her way to become one of the fastest growing businesses in America and a Top 20 global video game publisher, and launched Modus Games in 2018 to provide AAA publishing services to the best independent developers around the world. Christina is the recipient of several American Business Awards including Executive of the Year and Maverick of the Year.

Anisa Sanusi

Limit Break
Founder, UX/UI designer

Anisa Sanusi is a London based video games UI/UX Designer and Founder of Limit Break, a mentorship program for developers of underrepresented genders in the games industry. Throughout the years Anisa has cultivated a devotion to ethical UX design, speaking at the first UX Summit held at GDC in San Francisco and also served as a Juror for the BAFTA Games Awards for multiple years. Anisa is an advocate for diversity and inclusivity in the industry, and this year she was listed as one of GamesIndustry.Biz Top 100 Influential Women in the UK Games Industry.

Ivan Krechnak

PowerPlay Studio
CEO, Co-Founder

Originally a doctor of medicine, Ivan Krechnak has been involved in the game industry since 2003. Together with his two partners he founded PowerPlay Studio in 2007, a company primarily focused on developing online sports games. PowerPlay Studio has released 15 games played by over 12 million players worldwide. The best known titles are Biathlon Mania and Ski Jump Mania 3. Among other things, PowerPlay Studio is actively involved in the promotion of sports and supports talented athletes. The studio earned the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 in Central Europe award in 2014 as the fastest growing tech company in Slovakia.

Adam Boyes

Iron Galaxy Studios
CEO

As Chief Executive Officer of Iron Galaxy Studios, Adam Boyes is responsible for the Company’s overall strategic vision and core partnerships. Prior to this role, Boyes was Vice President of Third Party Relations & Developer Technology Group at Sony Interactive Entertainment America where he oversaw Publisher & Developer Relations, Portfolio Strategy, Financial Strategy, Partner Alliance, Technical Account Management, Developer Technology Group and the 3rd Party Production team – driving them to record revenue and profitability numbers consistently year over year. Previously, Boyes was Executive Producer and Director of Product Development at Midway Games and Capcom respectively. Boyes studied Computer Science & Business Administration at Simon Fraser University.

Dave Gilbert

Wadjet Eye Games
Owner

Dave has been interested in adventure games ever since 1986, when his mother made the mistake of buying him a copy of Infocom’s Wishbringer. Fifteen years later, he discovered the Adventure Game Studio engine and began making his own. In 2006, he decided that making games was too much fun to do anything else for a living, and formed Wadjet Eye Games to do just that.
In the 12 years since, Wadjet Eye has developed and published over 15 games including the Blackwell series, The Shivah, Gemini Rue, Primordia, Resonance, Shardlight, Technobabylon and (most recently) Unavowed.

Andrej Levenski

Gamepires
Technical Director / Co-Founder

Andrej is an industry veteran of 16 years and the Technical Director at Gamepires. He has been a programmer for much longer, almost 22 years, starting out as an enthusiast with his friends. He co-founded Gamepires 8 years ago, working on the in-house PranaEngine used on the award-winning Gas Guzzlers Extreme racing combat game, and has spent the last 2 years working in UE4 on SCUM, a multiplayer survival game currently in Early Access. His interests and experience span all technical areas of the game development.

Austin Wintory

Composer

Grammy-nominated and two-time British Academy Award-winning composer Austin Wintory diverse career has straddled the worlds of games, films and concert music. Austin’s soundtrack for the hit PS3 game Journey became the first-ever Grammy-nominated videogame score, also winning two British Academy Awards and many others! Austin’s score for the earlier game flOw made him the youngest composer ever to receive a British Academy Award nomination and also won him a wide variety of other game industry accolades, Since Journey’s release Austin’s subsequent scores to The Banner Saga, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate and ABZU have each earned BAFTA nominations. He collaborates regularly with orchestras and chamber ensembles around the world.

Ste Curran

Game designer, writer, broadcaster

Ste Curran is a game designer, writer and broadcaster. He’s perpetually working on games he can’t talk about, just like you, so instead of breaking NDAs he writes lengthy monologues about love, death and videogames, and Kills The Games Industry over and over again exclusively at Reboot. His radio show, One Life Left, is the longest-running videogame radio show in the world and he hosts Maraoke, the amazing modded karaoke night. Taylor Swift replied to him 13/3/2013.

Alen Ladavac

Google Stadia
Engineering Manager / Developer Experience

As the engineering manager for the Developer Experience team, Alen is making sure that developers making games for the Stadia platform have all the tools they need to access the power of Google to reach players on any screen.

Before joining Google, he has collected more than 25 years of experience on PC, console, mobile and VR games. Since 1993, he architected and developed the technology for all the games in the world-famous Serious Sam franchise and for the critically acclaimed The Talos Principle, as well as some smaller titles, for a wide range of platforms from 16-bit computers in the ‘90s, PC and various consoles as well as VR and mobile.

His broad range of interests and experience spans all technical areas of the game development, from rendering, sound and physics, to networking, build systems and content pipelines.

Ivan Švarc

Gamepires
Lead Animator

Ivan Švarc is an avid gamer who managed to build a successful career combining his two passions – art and video games. Currently working as Lead animator at Gamepires, he is also a senior 3D artist with over 20 years of experience. From working on award-winning Gas Guzzlers Extreme racing combat game to currently leading his team of animators on the PC survival game SCUM (developed in Unreal Engine 4), he has developed and expanded his expertise with each new project. This unsuccessfully treated perfectionist (or just a slow worker, as his wife would say) is truly a man of many talents – from miniature boat building to social dancing art form is too big or too small to be overlooked.

SWERY / Hidetaka Suehiro

White Owls Inc.
CEO

Swery is one of Japans representative indie developers. He’s been working in the game industry for 24 years, and continues to create unique, spirited work based on the slogan: From Osaka to all of YOU around the world. His representative works include Deadly Premonition, D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die, Spy Fiction, among others. His newest game MISSING: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories has received high praise for its anthropological value, such as being nominated for the Games for Impact category in the Game Awards 2018. In 2019, it won 2 NAVGTR Awards, one award at Japan’s biggest indie game show, BitSummit, and an Etna Comics Award at the biggest award ceremony in southern Italy. His next game, The Good Life is scheduled for release in 2019 and he has just announced that he is working intensively on Deadly Premonition 2 as game director!

Damir Durovic

Reboot
CEO

As a veteran of games industry with 22 years of combined experience in running huge games industry events, media and being key part on marketing and PR side of things Damir has seen empires fall and rise. For last 8 years together with an incredible and small but super agile team has been running REBOOT brand that besided running one of the biggest comsumer games shows in Europe, as well as the big European consumer games media is the company behind world famous Reboot Develop Blue and Red, two games industry conferences that have redefined the worldwide games industry event landscape. Damir was also recently elected to serve as an advisor on advisory board of European Game Developers Federation.