Rad­i­cal Approaches to Game Marketing

• Dan Lazar
• Leonie Man­shan­den
• Adam Mer­sky
• Chris Enock

Gam­ing Com­pany Finan­cial Analytics

• Dan Scherlis
• Michael Pachter
• David Cole
• Eric Costa

Hol­ly­wood, Music, and Gaming

• Chris Weaver
• Mike Dorn­brook
• Paul Neu­rath
• Mark Blecher
• Ian Davis

Mass Effect: The State of the Gam­ing Indus­try in Massachusetts

• Alex Aber
• Curt Schilling
• Jason Schup­bach
• Bob Fer­arri
• Brian Bal­four
• Tom Dusenberry

How to Build and Launch a Gam­ing Startup

• Stephen Chark­oudian
• Eitan Glin­ert
• Matt Nichols
• Pano Anthos
• Wal­ter Somol
• Dave Cap­pillo

The Chang­ing Face of Social Games

• Steve Meret­zky
• Nabeel Hyatt
• Jef­frey Anderson
• Eduard Baraf
• Steve Cur­ran

The Next BIG Thing

• Greg Boyd
• Jes­sica Mulligan
• Cindy Arm­strong
• Craig Alexan­der

Game Com­mu­ni­ties for Fun and Profit

• Eric Gold­berg
• Tom George
• Jon Rad­off
• Gor­don Walton
• Chris­t­ian Meyer

Steve Meret­zky

Busi­ness & Pas­sion: Syn­ergy is Success

Com­puter games syn­the­size pas­sion and busi­ness to pro­vide enter­tain­ment and eco­nomic oppor­tu­ni­ties.  The Gor­don Wal­ton starts from why games even exist, describes the folks involved and what dri­ves them, end­ing on how to actu­ally suc­ceed in pulling off syn­er­giz­ing games and busi­ness. An extended Q&A will fol­low the presentation.

Gor­don Walton

Co-Studio Direc­tor, BioWare Austin

Gor­don Wal­ton has been author­ing games and man­ag­ing game devel­op­ment since 1977. He is cur­rently VP and co-Studio Gen­eral Man­ager at BioWare Austin work­ing on Star Wars®: The Old Repub­lic™. Pre­vi­ously he was VP, Exec­u­tive Pro­ducer and Stu­dio Man­ager at Sony Online Enter­tain­ment in Austin, work­ing on an unan­nounced prod­uct and Star Wars Galax­ies. Prior to join­ing Sony Online Enter­tain­ment, Gor­don was VP and Exec­u­tive Pro­ducer of The Sims Online at Elec­tronic Arts/Maxis, and in the same role for Ori­gin Sys­tems man­ag­ing Ultima Online™: He also served as Senior VP and Gen­eral Man­ager of Kesmai Stu­dios where he over­saw the devel­op­ment sev­eral MMOGs includ­ing Air War­rior™ and Mul­ti­player Bat­tletech™. Gor­don has owned and man­aged two devel­op­ment com­pa­nies and was devel­op­ment man­ager for both Three-Sixty Pacific and Kon­ami of Amer­ica, Inc. He has per­son­ally devel­oped over thirty games and over­seen the devel­op­ment of over 200 games.

Gor­don has been a speaker at every Game Devel­op­ers Con­fer­ence since its incep­tion in 1988. Gor­don has also been a fea­tured speaker at indus­try events such as E3, Austin Game Devel­op­ers Con­fer­ence, East Coast Com­puter Game Devel­op­ers Con­fer­ence, Kagan Con­fer­ence, Japan Per­sonal Com­puter Soft­ware Asso­ci­a­tion Con­fer­ence, and Jupiter’s Conference.

Gor­don is a found­ing mem­ber of the Inter­na­tional Game Devel­op­ers Asso­ci­a­tion (IGDA) and a mem­ber of the Acad­emy of Inter­ac­tive Arts and Sci­ences (AIAS). Gor­don holds a B.S. degree in com­puter sci­ence from Texas A&M Uni­ver­sity with a minor in elec­tri­cal engineering.

Clos­ing Keynote

Steve Meret­zky is VP of Game Design for Play­dom, one of the lead­ing social game com­pa­nies. His nearly 30 years in elec­tronic gam­ing, and his year and half in the flegling field of social games, gives him a unique per­spec­tive on this new way for peo­ple to games together. He talks about the busi­ness and design of social games today, and a glimpse of what to expect from the social games of tomorrow.

Steve Meret­zky

Mod­er­a­tor, VP of Game Design, Playdom

It’s hard to have a seri­ous con­ver­sa­tion about gam­ing with­out men­tion of Steve. It’s also hard to have a humor­ous con­ver­sa­tion about gam­ing with­out men­tion of him. Steve’s con­tri­bu­tions to the indus­try began in 1981 at the leg­endary adven­ture game com­pany Info­com, where his titles included Plan­et­fall, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (a col­lab­o­ra­tion with Dou­glas Adams), Leather God­desses of Pho­bos and Zork Zero. Prior to join­ing Play­dom, Steve co-founded Boffo Games and held senior cre­ative posts at Blue Fang Games, Flood­gate Enter­tain­ment and WorldWinner.com. Over his pro­lific career, Steve also con­sulted with teams at Activi­sion, Bliz­zard, Dis­ney, EA, Har­monix, Has­bro and Leg­end, to name a few. Steve is a for­mer board mem­ber of IGDA, a fre­quent lec­turer at indus­try events, and an orga­nizer of both the Social & Online Games Sum­mit at the GDC and the Game Design­ers Work­shop. Steve holds a degree in con­struc­tion project man­age­ment from MIT, but oth­er­wise assures us that he did not waste his four years there.

The Next BIG Thing

This panel of game indus­try lead­ers will dis­cuss their views on the trends that are going to make the biggest dif­fer­ence in com­ing years. What is the Next Big Thing? Where is money to be made and what do we think is des tined to flop and why. We will review and ana­lyze recent ideas such as vir­tual prop­erty; social media plat forms, screen con­ver­gence, mobile games, and dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion. We will address ques­tions like: Will the next home plat­form gen­er­a­tion be the last one, replaced with cloud com­put­ing? What will it take to dethrone World of War craft or has Far­mville already dethroned World of War craft? What legal pit falls await new busi­ness mod­els? What inter­na­tional busi­ness and legal issues are on the hori­zon? What are the best anti-piracy strate­gies going for­ward? How will used game sales con­tinue to inter act with the devel­op­ment of dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion? Clearly, we are mak­ing all of this up, but our prog­nos­ti­ca­tions are bet­ter than most.

Greg Boyd

Mod­er­a­tor, Davis & Gilbert LLP

Greg Boyd is an attor­ney with Davis & Gilbert LLP in New York. He has rep­re­sented some of the most promi­nent game com­pa­nies in the world. His work includes coun­sel­ing, cor­po­rate, and intel­lec­tual prop­erty trans­ac­tional ser­vices for many game indus­try com­pa­nies includ­ing pub­lish­ers and devel­op­ers. He is an author and co-editor of the pop­u­lar ref­er­ence book Busi­ness and Legal Primer for Game Devel­op­ment. He has been an invited lec­turer at Har­vard Busi­ness School, MIT, Colum­bia Law School and other aca­d­e­mic insti­tu­tions. Dr. Boyd has spo­ken at sev­eral national and inter­na­tional con­fer­ences includ­ing GDC, Austin, PAX, and State of Play. His com­men­tary on busi­ness and law in the game indus­try has appeared in sev­eral news sources includ­ing For­tune, Forbes, CNN, Game Devel­oper Mag­a­zine, and Gama­su­tra. He sits on the Board of Advi­sors for Mobygames. Dr. Boyd obtained MD and JD degrees from the Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina at Chapel Hill and an MBA from NYU-Stern.

Jes­sica Mulligan

Exec­u­tive Consultant

Jes­sica Mul­li­gan is an online game pro­fes­sional with over 20 years of indus­try expe­ri­ence at all lev­els of man­age­ment. Her past posi­tions include senior exec­u­tive and man­age­ment tours at Elec­tronic Arts, Inter­play Pro­duc­tions, Nevrax/Paris, Tur­bine Games, Sun­flow­ers GmbH, GEnie, MM3D.Com and Amer­ica Online. In her career, she has been involved with the design, devel­op­ment and/or man­age­ment of many online games and ser­vices, includ­ing a dozen massively-multiplayer online games.

A respected author and com­men­ta­tor on online games, Jes­sica is the co-author of “Devel­op­ing Online Games: An Insider’s Guide” with Brid­gette Patro­vsky, which was pub­lished world­wide in 2003 in sev­eral lan­guages, includ­ing Chi­nese and Korean, and is widely con­sid­ered ‘the bible’ for online game devel­op­ment. She was also the author of the influ­en­tial bi-weekly indus­try opin­ion col­umn, “Bit­ing the Hand”, between 1997 and 2003.

Among her hon­ors, Ms. Mul­li­gan was named in 2006 as one of the Game Industry’s 100 Most Influ­en­tial Women by Next Gen­er­a­tion mag­a­zine and in

2007 as one of the five most impor­tant peo­ple in the devel­op­ment of vir­tual worlds and MMOs by Dr. Richard Bar­tle, co-creator of the orig­i­nal MUD and known as the “father of online gaming.”

Cindy Arm­strong

CEO, Elec­tric Bat Interactive

Craig Alexan­der

VP Prod­uct Devel­op­ment, Turbine

Craig Alexan­der joined Tur­bine in 2007 as the Vice Pres­i­dent of Prod­uct Devel­op­ment and over­sees the devel­op­ment and pro­duc­tion of all of Turbine’s fran­chises includ­ing The Lord of the Rings Online™, Dun­geons & Drag­ons Online™, Asheron’s Call®, and all future projects. Craig brings over twenty years of engi­neer­ing and stu­dio gen­eral man­age­ment expe­ri­ence to Turbine.

Most recently, he held the posi­tion of Vice Pres­i­dent and Gen­eral Man­ager of Z-Axis, an Activi­sion stu­dio. In this role, he man­aged the devel­op­ment of mul­ti­ple con­sole titles, includ­ing the 2006 X-Men game. Pre­vi­ously, he was Vice Pres­i­dent and Exec­u­tive Pro­ducer for Elec­tronic Arts Part­ners, man­ag­ing a port­fo­lio of exter­nally devel­oped PC and con­sole titles rang­ing from licensed movie games to new intel­lec­tual prop­erty, and Vice Pres­i­dent of Online for Elec­tronic Arts’ West­wood Stu­dios in Las Vegas man­ag­ing EA’s MMORPG Earth & Beyond. Prior to Elec­tronic Arts, he was Gen­eral Man­ager for Sierra Online’s orig­i­nal devel­op­ment stu­dio near Yosemite National Park, ship­ping numer­ous titles and over­see­ing Sierra’s entry into the MMORPG segment.

Mr. Alexan­der grad­u­ated from the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia with a BSEE in Com­puter Engi­neer­ing and received his MBA from the Ander­son School at UCLA.

How to Build and Launch a Gam­ing Startup

You’re pas­sion­ate about games, see oppor­tu­ni­ties and are inter­ested in being part of this fast-growing and excit­ing space.  So many options  … social and online games, mobile games, con­sole games, game tools, and more.  Our panel of game indus­try entre­pre­neurs, pub­lish­ers, investors and advi­sors will pro­vide advice based on real-life expe­ri­ence and hard lessons learned.  What are the emerg­ing busi­ness mod­els that are spawn­ing gam­ing star­tups?  Who do you approach for money – and when?  How do you build your team?  In a lively dis­cus­sion, our panel will cover these impor­tant issues and more. 

Stephen Chark­oudian

Mod­er­a­tor, Good­win Procter

Steve Chark­oudian is the chair of Good­win Procter’s Tech­nol­ogy Trans­ac­tions Prac­tice and a mem­ber of the firm’s Tech­nol­ogy Com­pa­nies Group.  Steve’s prac­tice con­cen­trates on tech­nol­ogy and intel­lec­tual prop­erty trans­ac­tions, includ­ing tech­nol­ogy trans­fers and licens­ing; col­lab­o­ra­tion, strate­gic alliance and joint devel­op­ment agree­ments; open source issues; and due dili­gence and other intel­lec­tual prop­erty issues in merg­ers, acqui­si­tions and ven­ture cap­i­tal and pri­vate equity transactions. 

Steve rep­re­sents pri­vate and pub­lic com­pa­nies and pri­vate equity and ven­ture cap­i­tal firms in a wide range of indus­tries, includ­ing soft­ware, Inter­net, clean tech­nolo­gies, social media and net­work­ing, social games, con­sole and online games, vir­tual worlds, adver­tis­ing, hard­ware, med­ical devices, com­mu­ni­ca­tions and net­work­ing equip­ment, finan­cial ser­vices and infor­ma­tion ser­vices.   He recently rep­re­sented Cit­rix in a col­lab­o­ra­tion agree­ment with Microsoft, Besse­mer Ven­ture Part­ners in con­nec­tion with its invest­ment in OMGPOP, and Tur­bine, Inc. with respect to its dis­tri­b­u­tion and local­iza­tion agree­ment with CDC Games.

Eitan Glin­ert

Founder, Fire Hose Games

Fire Hose Games is a new Cam­bridge based indie stu­dio mak­ing down­load­able con­sole and PC games with a pos­i­tive angle, and Eitan is the founder and cre­ative direc­tor. Awe­some! Their first title, Slam Bolt Scrap­pers, is an inno­v­a­tive mash up of build­ing and brawl­ing. Play­ers will reach for the sky and build the great­est tow­ers in Slam Bolt City while defend­ing against devi­ously charm­ing bad­dies and epic bosses. The game fea­tures 4 way co-op and head to head mul­ti­player, and boasts sim­ple yet sur­pris­ingly deep com­pet­i­tive bat­tle mode. Before Fire Hose Eitan spent sev­eral years mak­ing edu­ca­tional and acces­si­ble games, includ­ing AudiOdyssey, the first Wii Remote game acces­si­ble to the blind. Eitan plays ice hockey reli­giously and thinks Lem­mings is the great­est game ever made.

Matt Nichols

High­land Cap­i­tal Partners

Matt is a Prin­ci­pal at High­land focus­ing on dig­i­tal media and Inter­net invest­ments with an empha­sis on online adver­tis­ing, mass-customization, and online media. He invests in early stage com­pa­nies as well as later stage oppor­tu­ni­ties includ­ing growth equity, ven­ture buy­outs, spin-outs and recap­i­tal­iza­tions. Matt rep­re­sents High­land on the board of U.S. Search and is actively involved with Bull­horn, Gem­vara, Hang­out Indus­tries, The Open­Sky Project and Tur­bine. Matt is a Found­ing Exec­u­tive Com­mit­tee Mem­ber of First Growth Ven­ture Net­work a net­work of ven­ture and angel investors sup­port­ing first and sec­ond time entre­pre­neurs build­ing excit­ing com­pa­nies in the New York area.

Back­ground

Prior to join­ing High­land, Matt was a mem­ber of Google’s cor­po­rate devel­op­ment team, where he was respon­si­ble for dig­i­tal media acqui­si­tions and invest­ments. Matt also worked at Mor­gan Stan­ley Ven­ture Part­ners, where he iden­ti­fied and man­aged invest­ments in the tech­nol­ogy sec­tor. His invest­ments included Ava­mar (acquired by EMC), Tarari (acquired by LSI) and Per­cep­tive Soft­ware. Matt was a mem­ber of Mor­gan Stanley’s Tech­nol­ogy Cor­po­rate Finance group, where he was part of the Google IPO team and advised clients such as Dell and Intuit.

Matt also con­sulted for the Harry Fox Agency (the rights enforce­ment arm of the National Music Pub­lish­ers Asso­ci­a­tion) on the impact of dig­i­tal deliv­ery and Inter­net adver­tis­ing on the music industry.

Edu­ca­tion

Pomona Col­lege, B.A., Math­e­mat­i­cal Economics

Tuck School of Busi­ness at Dart­mouth, M.B.A. with High Distinction

Inter­ests

Matt is an avid rac­quet sport player (bad­minton and squash) and was for­merly a nation­ally ranked bad­minton player.

Pano Anthos

CEO, Hang­out Industries

Pano Anthos is a four-time ser­ial entre­pre­neur and is cur­rently the Founder, Pres­i­dent and CEO of Hang­out Indus­tries, a Techcrunch 50 final­ist in 2008 and the 2008 MITX Dig­i­tal Media win­ner for “Best Use of Tech­nol­ogy.” Before Hang­out, Pano founded and served as the Pres­i­dent and CEO of Pan­tero since its incep­tion in April 2003 until it was sold to Progress Soft­ware in June 2006. Prior to that, he served as Pres­i­dent and CEO of EcoNovo, where he was ini­tially a con­sul­tant to the com­pany, pro­vid­ing strate­gic sales and mar­ket­ing coun­sel. Before his tenure at EcoNovo, Mr. Anthos was a co-founder of ClearCross (pre­vi­ously Syn­tra), where, over 18 years, he built the com­pany to the lead­ing posi­tion in the global commerce/ITL space, with 1,000 cus­tomers in 20 coun­tries and invested cap­i­tal of over $80 mil­lion.  Mr. Anthos is a fre­quent speaker at con­fer­ences and a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor to sev­eral indus­try pub­li­ca­tions. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the Uni­ver­sity of Delaware and a master’s degree from Colum­bia University.

Wal­ter Somol

Global Pub­lish­ing Busi­ness Devel­op­ment, Microsoft

Wal­ter Somol runs one of Microsoft’s Inter­ac­tive Enter­tain­ment Busi­ness Devel­op­ment teams, direct­ing third party strate­gic part­ner­ships and dri­ving busi­ness mod­el­ing and strat­egy for key plat­form ini­tia­tives.  An avid gamer, Wal­ter got his start in the inter­ac­tive busi­ness work­ing on total con­ver­sion for Quake 3, build­ing some of the more pop­u­lar maps, as well as cre­at­ing and ani­mat­ing char­ac­ter mod­els.  That pas­sion for mak­ing games launched him into the video game indus­try, work­ing with top tier con­sole, PC, online and mobile pub­lish­ers and devel­op­ers for over 10 years.   He has seen a num­ber of dif­fer­ent sides of the busi­ness, ini­tially in rep­re­sent­ing devel­op­ers, other cre­atives and licens­ing part­ners, later work­ing at a video game pub­lisher and now with a plat­form owner. 

Dave Cap­pillo

Part­ner, Good­win Procter

David Cap­pillo is a part­ner in Good­win Procter’s Cor­po­rate and Tech­nol­ogy Com­pa­nies Groups. He has exten­sive expe­ri­ence in cor­po­rate, merg­ers and acqui­si­tions, ven­ture cap­i­tal and growth equity, secu­ri­ties laws and tech­nol­ogy licens­ing areas. Mr. Cap­pillo rep­re­sents pri­vate and pub­lic growth com­pa­nies in a vari­ety of indus­tries, includ­ing media, com­mu­ni­ca­tions, energy, soft­ware, infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy ser­vices, con­sumer prod­ucts and indus­trial prod­ucts. He coun­sels his clients on cor­po­rate finance mat­ters, equity fundrais­ing activ­i­ties, merg­ers and acqui­si­tions, cor­po­rate gov­er­nance, start-up and for­ma­tion mat­ters, recap­i­tal­iza­tions and reor­ga­ni­za­tions, joint ven­ture and strate­gic com­mer­cial trans­ac­tions and inter­na­tional expan­sion. Mr. Cap­pillo also rep­re­sents lead­ing pri­vate equity and ven­ture cap­i­tal investors in con­nec­tion with ven­ture and growth equity invest­ments in oper­at­ing com­pa­nies in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia.

Game Com­mu­ni­ties for Fun and Profit

The Art and Sci­ence of Trans­mut­ing Play­ers into Revenues

   Once upon a time, when the Classes of 2010 and 2011 were in grade school, sell­ing games was a short and rel­a­tively uncom­pli­cated process:  shiny discs were sold for $50 to $60 and, if these weren’t returned within 48 hours, the customer’s money was yours. Fast for­ward 15 years, first con­tent wants to be free, then peo­ple start to expect games for free; and, as a con­se­quence, suc­cess in the games busi­ness requires work­ing con­tin­u­ously to gar­ner rev­enue from players.

   In a high-level dis­cus­sion, five indus­try experts review best prac­tices for per­suad­ing play­ers to open their wal­lets, and to give episodic finan­cial sup­port to a game through its com­mer­cial life. We’ll start with a sur­vey of the dark art of direct mar­ket­ing, includ­ing acqui­si­tion, reten­tion, and upselling; and then segue to com­mu­nity and cus­tomer man­age­ment, includ­ing achiev­ing crit­i­cal mass, sup­ply­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for the more pas­sion­ate play­ers to become acci­den­tal sales­per­sons, and cus­tomer ser­vice. Both e-commerce and Web ser­vices will make cameo appear­ances, giv­ing atten­dees a holis­tic view of the rev­enue model of the mod­ern game business.

Eric Gold­berg

Mod­er­a­tor, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor, Crossover Technologies

Eric is a 30-year vet­eran of the game indus­try, serv­ing in capac­i­ties rang­ing from game designer to exec­u­tive. Since 2002, Eric is or has been a board mem­ber of, advi­sor or con­sul­tant to over 30 consumer-facing tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies, from seed-stage to pub­lic, in the game, vir­tual world, con­sumer Inter­net, wire­less data, and mon­e­ti­za­tion sec­tors; and to three US ven­ture cap­i­tal firms. Pre­vi­ously, Eric was co-founder and pres­i­dent of Unplugged Games and of Crossover Tech­nolo­gies, the con­sumer online pio­neer; and pres­i­dent of West End Games, an adven­ture game com­pany. He’s been a speaker and a mem­ber of the pro­grams advi­sory board for seven national game, wire­less, and Inter­net con­fer­ences; and a board mem­ber for the New York New Media Asso­ci­a­tion and NYU’s Cen­ter for Advanced Dig­i­tal Appli­ca­tions. His award-winning games include Para­noia, Tales of the Ara­bian Nights, The Tom Peters Busi­ness School in a Box, and Mad­Maze, the first online game to draw one mil­lion players.

Tom George

Direc­tor of Online Mar­ket­ing and E-Commerce, Turbine

Tom George is the Direc­tor of Online Mar­ket­ing and E-Commerce for Tur­bine, Inc., the devel­oper of Mas­sively Multi-player Online Games Dun­geons & Drag­ons Online®: Eber­ron Unlim­ited™ and The Lord of the Rings Online™, two of the largest, most pop­u­lar IP-branded MMOs in the world.

Tom is respon­si­ble for dri­ving new play­ers to Turbine’s games and over­sees the company’s online media and acqui­si­tion efforts. Addi­tion­ally, Tom directs the company’s Direct Mar­ket­ing and E-Commerce/Microtransaction groups. He was one of the pri­mary archi­tects of the microtransaction-based busi­ness model, in-game store, and vir­tual cur­rency economies for Dun­geons & Drag­ons Online (DDO). Tom helped lead the tran­si­tion of DDO from a subscription-only MMO to a hybrid Free-to-Play game, mak­ing it one of the best Free-to-Play games available.

Prior to his work at Tur­bine, Tom was the Direc­tor of Prod­uct and Mar­ket­ing for PoxNora, a microtransaction-based online strat­egy game now part of Sony Online Enter­tain­ment. Tom also worked for World­Win­ner, cur­rently a divi­sion of Lib­erty Media’s Game Show Net­work, as its Direc­tor of Cus­tomer Mar­ket­ing. In both of these roles Tom drove con­tin­ual rev­enue growth via micro­trans­ac­tional busi­ness mod­els while increas­ing player reten­tion and engage­ment through data­base marketing-driven life­cy­cle management.

Tom is always excited to share his expe­ri­ences and views on in-game vir­tual economies, micro­trans­ac­tion busi­ness mod­els, vir­tual goods cat­a­log devel­op­ment and man­age­ment, and how these can help enhance the enter­tain­ment value of games.

Tom holds an M.B.A. from Bab­son Col­lege and a B.A. in Ger­man Stud­ies from Amherst College.

Jon Rad­off

CEO, Dis­rup­tor Beam LLC

Jon Rad­off is an entre­pre­neur focused on the inter­sec­tion of the Inter­net, enter­tain­ment and social com­mu­ni­ties. In 1992, he started NovaLink, an online game pub­lisher that cre­ated Leg­ends of Future Past, dis­trib­uted com­mer­cial on the Com­puServe net­work. Leg­ends became one of the first inde­pen­dent, com­mer­cial game prod­ucts on the Inter­net. In 1997, Jon founded Eprise, the cre­ator of a con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem that was a fore­run­ner of mod­ern blog and wiki tech­nol­ogy. At Eprise, Jon raised ven­ture cap­i­tal, estab­lished prod­uct strat­egy and recruited a man­age­ment team that suc­ceeded in tak­ing Eprise into For­tune 500 cus­tomers, cul­mi­nat­ing in a pub­lic offer­ing on NASDAQ in 2000. In 2006, Jon started GamerDNA, a venture-capital funded social media com­pany that built prod­ucts dri­ven by real-time gamer behav­ior. GamerDNA’s adver­tis­ing prod­uct reached over 10 mil­lion unique users per month and counted top-tier game pub­lish­ers includ­ing Blizzard/Activision, Elec­tronic Arts, Namco and Tur­bine amongst its cus­tomers. GamerDNA merged with Crispy Gamer in 2009.

Jon’s new startup, Dis­rup­tor Beam, is a stealth-mode social game pub­lisher that will dis­rupt the cur­rent social game land­scape by lever­ag­ing Jon’s expe­ri­ence with soft­ware plat­forms, ana­lyt­ics and online communities.

Gor­don Walton

Co-Studio Direc­tor, BioWare Austin

Gor­don Wal­ton has been author­ing games and man­ag­ing game devel­op­ment since 1977. He is cur­rently VP and co-Studio Gen­eral Man­ager at BioWare Austin work­ing on Star Wars®: The Old Repub­lic™. Pre­vi­ously he was VP, Exec­u­tive Pro­ducer and Stu­dio Man­ager at Sony Online Enter­tain­ment in Austin, work­ing on an unan­nounced prod­uct and Star Wars Galax­ies. Prior to join­ing Sony Online Enter­tain­ment, Gor­don was VP and Exec­u­tive Pro­ducer of The Sims Online at Elec­tronic Arts/Maxis, and in the same role for Ori­gin Sys­tems man­ag­ing Ultima Online™: He also served as Senior VP and Gen­eral Man­ager of Kesmai Stu­dios where he over­saw the devel­op­ment sev­eral MMOGs includ­ing Air War­rior™ and Mul­ti­player Bat­tletech™. Gor­don has owned and man­aged two devel­op­ment com­pa­nies and was devel­op­ment man­ager for both Three-Sixty Pacific and Kon­ami of Amer­ica, Inc. He has per­son­ally devel­oped over thirty games and over­seen the devel­op­ment of over 200 games.

Gor­don has been a speaker at every Game Devel­op­ers Con­fer­ence since its incep­tion in 1988. Gor­don has also been a fea­tured speaker at indus­try events such as E3, Austin Game Devel­op­ers Con­fer­ence, East Coast Com­puter Game Devel­op­ers Con­fer­ence, Kagan Con­fer­ence, Japan Per­sonal Com­puter Soft­ware Asso­ci­a­tion Con­fer­ence, and Jupiter’s Conference.

Gor­don is a found­ing mem­ber of the Inter­na­tional Game Devel­op­ers Asso­ci­a­tion (IGDA) and a mem­ber of the Acad­emy of Inter­ac­tive Arts and Sci­ences (AIAS). Gor­don holds a B.S. degree in com­puter sci­ence from Texas A&M Uni­ver­sity with a minor in elec­tri­cal engineering.

Chris­t­ian Meyer

Senior Vice President/General Man­ager, GSN Dig­i­tal Solutions

Chris­t­ian Meyer is Senior Vice Pres­i­dent and Gen­eral Man­ager of GSN Dig­i­tal Solu­tions, the team within GSN focused on man­age­ment of GSN.com, Teagames.com, GSN’s syn­di­cat­able games cur­rency – Oodles, and the GSN Games Net­work with reach of over 24 mil­lion unique vis­i­tors per month.  In his role, Chris­t­ian is respon­si­ble for the strate­gic and oper­a­tional man­age­ment of mar­ket­ing, prod­uct, tech­nol­ogy, design, com­mu­nity and player services.

Prior to this cur­rent role, Chris­t­ian served as Chief Mar­ket­ing Offi­cer for World­Win­ner  man­ag­ing all aspects of the con­sumer expe­ri­ence for the indus­try lead­ing com­pe­ti­tion games site, lever­ag­ing the company’s robust con­tent part­ner­ships and dis­tri­b­u­tion net­works to increase player acqui­si­tion and reten­tion. A vet­eran in the new media and home enter­tain­ment indus­tries, Chris­t­ian has held prior mar­ket­ing, prod­uct, sales and busi­ness devel­op­ment posi­tions at Com­cast, Odyssey, MediaOne and AT&T Broadband.

Chris­t­ian grad­u­ated from Har­vard Uni­ver­sity with a Bach­e­lor of Arts in His­tory. He has been con­sis­tently rec­og­nized for mar­ket­ing and lead­er­ship excel­lence, hav­ing received three awards for mar­ket­ing excel­lence from the Cable and Tele­vi­sion Asso­ci­a­tion for Mar­ket­ing (CTAM), a Cor­ner­stones of Excel­lence Award from AT&T Broad­band for lead­er­ship excel­lence, and a schol­ar­ship to Har­vard Busi­ness School Exec­u­tive Edu­ca­tion pro­gram for lead­er­ship excellence.

The Chang­ing Face of Social Games

Steve Meret­zky

Mod­er­a­tor, VP of Game Design, Playdom

It’s hard to have a seri­ous con­ver­sa­tion about gam­ing with­out men­tion of Steve. It’s also hard to have a humor­ous con­ver­sa­tion about gam­ing with­out men­tion of him. Steve’s con­tri­bu­tions to the indus­try began in 1981 at the leg­endary adven­ture game com­pany Info­com, where his titles included Plan­et­fall, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (a col­lab­o­ra­tion with Dou­glas Adams), Leather God­desses of Pho­bos and Zork Zero. Prior to join­ing Play­dom, Steve co-founded Boffo Games and held senior cre­ative posts at Blue Fang Games, Flood­gate Enter­tain­ment and WorldWinner.com. Over his pro­lific career, Steve also con­sulted with teams at Activi­sion, Bliz­zard, Dis­ney, EA, Har­monix, Has­bro and Leg­end, to name a few. Steve is a for­mer board mem­ber of IGDA, a fre­quent lec­turer at indus­try events, and an orga­nizer of both the Social & Online Games Sum­mit at the GDC and the Game Design­ers Work­shop. Steve holds a degree in con­struc­tion project man­age­ment from MIT, but oth­er­wise assures us that he did not waste his four years there.

Nabeel Hyatt

Founder & CEO, Con­duit Labs

Nabeel is Founder and CEO of Con­duit Labs, rein­vent­ing games and music, one game at a time. Built by a team respon­si­ble for prod­ucts as diverse as the Ambi­ent Orb, Rock Band, and Lord of the Rings Online, Conduit’s mis­sion is to build a plat­form for social music gam­ing on the web. Con­duit is ven­ture funded by the excel­lent folks at Charles River Ven­tures and Prism. Check our our games on the web and Face­book.

Nabeel was most recently an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at a VC, help­ing estab­lish their gam­ing invest­ment the­sis and incu­bat­ing Con­duit Labs. Pre­vi­ously he was COO and VP Prod­uct Devel­op­ment at Ambi­ent Devices, where he helped pio­neer glance­able tech­nol­ogy: embed­ding Inter­net infor­ma­tion in every­day objects, which won the 2002 “Ideas of the Year” award in The NY Times. Prior to that Nabeel served as COO/CMO of Teamtalk, a new media sports com­pany and pio­neer in SMS-based sub­scrip­tion ser­vices which reached $160m in rev­enue and went pub­lic on the LSE in 2001.

Nabeel is also active in the Boston startup com­mu­nity as an advi­sor and investor, and is a men­tor at the seed men­tor­ship orga­ni­za­tion Tech­stars. Nabeel was a 2004 nom­i­nee for the Top 100 Inno­va­tors Under 30 from MIT Tech­nol­ogy Review. He has been quoted in Newsweek, The NY Times, Busi­ness 2.0, and has been a fea­tured speaker at SXSW, CES, Game Developer’s Con­fer­ence, and the Vir­tual Goods Summit.

Jef­frey Anderson

Founder & CEO, Quick Hit

Mus­cle Car Buff. Power Lifter. Polka Danc­ing Champion.

Hav­ing lived through­out the United States, Jeff com­bines his hard-working Mid­west roots with Cal­i­for­nia inno­va­tion and Yan­kee inge­nu­ity. When he’s not at Quick Hit (which is most of the time), Jeff can be found in his garage, cov­ered in grease with a blow torch in one hand, rebuild­ing his ’65 Cor­vair con­vert­ible. The com­pleted Cor­vair will one day join Jeff’s col­lec­tion of cars, includ­ing, a ’69 Chev­elle, ’31 Ford and ’72 Fiat Spyder.

As Quick Hit’s Founder and CEO, Jeff brings a strong back­ground in game design, prod­uct man­age­ment and busi­ness devel­op­ment to the com­pany. Prior to start­ing Quick Hit, Jeff was the pres­i­dent and CEO of Tur­bine, Inc. for seven years, where he rebuilt that com­pany into a global pub­lisher of MMORPG’s with hits like Dun­geons & Drag­ons Online and The Lord of the Rings Online. Before Tur­bine, he served as the vice pres­i­dent and exec­u­tive in charge of pro­duc­tion at Origin/ Elec­tronic Arts, where he man­aged the Ultima fran­chise. Prior to Ori­gin, Jeff was the exec­u­tive direc­tor for the con­sumer prod­ucts divi­sion of Via­com, Inc., man­ag­ing Para­mount Pic­tures’ world-wide inter­ac­tive licens­ing. Before Via­com, he was the vice pres­i­dent of oper­a­tions at Mis­sion Stu­dios Cor­po­ra­tion and prac­ticed law at Holleb & Coff. He grad­u­ated summa cum laude from the Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois with a bachelor’s degree in eco­nom­ics and received his J.D. from Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Law School. Jeff is reg­u­larly quoted in the main­stream media, includ­ing; The Wall Street Jour­nal, Time Mag­a­zine, Forbes, Busi­ness­Week, New York Times, Los Ange­les Times, Boston Globe, Reuters, Asso­ci­ated Press, and many others.

Eduardo Baraf

Eduardo Baraf is respon­si­ble for end-to-end prod­uct devel­op­ment for all social, online and moble plat­form projects. Eduardo is directly respon­si­ble for all aspects of Zoo King­dom devel­op­ment and over­sees devel­op­ment of other online and moblie projects with­ing Blue Fang. Prior to launch­ing Zoo King­dom, Eduardo released Lion Pride on the iPhone.

Prior to join­ing Blue Fang Games, Eduardo was Direc­tor of Prod­uct Man­age­ment at Tab­ula Digita respon­si­ble for their PC and Casual Online prod­ucts in the edu­ca­tional game space. This included devel­op­ing design and prod­uct require­ments, build­ing bud­gets, over­see­ing resources, build­ing usage met­rics, man­ag­ing exter­nal devel­op­ment teams and con­trac­tors, and archi­tect­ing the over­all prod­uct line imple­men­ta­tion. Some spe­cific projects he was involved in was the MMO casual edu­ca­tion game The League of Sci­en­tists and the Mul­ti­player edu­ca­tion FPS Dimen­sion M.

Prior to Tab­ula Digita, Eduardo was Stu­dio Head at Mind Con­trol Soft­ware where he over­saw all of Mind Control’s devel­op­ment efforts, day-to-day stu­dio oper­a­tions, and finances. He grew the staff of 12 to 40 and con­tributed his design and pro­duc­tion skills to numer­ous titles. Before his pro­mo­tion to Stu­dio Head, Eduardo per­formed as a Project Man­ager, Pro­ducer and Lead Designer for the studio.

Steve Cur­ran

Founder &Cre­ative Direc­tor, Pod Dig­i­tal Design

Steve Cur­ran is the founder and cre­ative direc­tor of Pod Dig­i­tal Design, an inter­ac­tive enter­tain­ment stu­dio spe­cial­iz­ing in branded games for social media, web and mobile platforms. He has directed break­through inter­ac­tive entertainment-based cam­paigns for clients such as Warner Broth­ers, His­tory Chan­nel, AETN, Atlantic Records, Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel, Star­wood Resorts, Yahoo!, GSN, and many oth­ers. Before start­ing Pod Dig­i­tal in 2002, he was founder of Pod New Media in Miami in 1995, one of Miami’s first inter­ac­tive design firms, and was vice president/creative direc­tor of Game­tek where he over­saw the devel­op­ment of numer­ous best-selling titles for Nin­tendo, Sega, Sony and Playsta­tion. He is the author of the books Motion Graph­ics: Design for Tele­vi­sion and Film, and Con­ver­gence Design for Inter­ac­tive Tele­vi­sion, Broad­band and Wire­less. He is con­tribut­ing author to the book Con­nected Mar­ket­ing, writ­ing about branded games and enter­tain­ment. Pod’s branded social-games have been rec­og­nized and won top-awards at the Boston Ad Club Hatch Awards, the MITX Awards, The One Show Enter­tain­ment Awards, The Webby Awards and others.

Gam­ing Com­pany Finan­cial Analytics

Dan Scherlis

Mod­er­a­tor, Scherlis.com

Dan Scherlis is a con­sult­ing exec­u­tive pro­ducer with 15-years expe­ri­ence with social media and elec­tronic enter­tain­ment.  Dan was CEO of massively-multiplayer devel­oper Tur­bine dur­ing its ini­tial five years, serv­ing as pro­ducer of the Microsoft-published Asheron’s Call.  He was then found­ing Con­tent Direc­tor of a new mobile-games ven­ture within tele­com giant Comverse. 

Before join­ing Tur­bine, Dan pro­posed and led a new game-publishing ini­tia­tive for Papyrus Design Group, where he pro­duced Indy­Car Rac­ing. Dan has been an advi­sor to Flood­gate Enter­tain­ment and other online-content and online-community ven­tures.  Dan holds AB, AM (Lin­guis­tics), and MBA degrees from Harvard.

Michael Pachter

Wed­bush Morgan

Mr. Pachter is an ana­lyst at Wed­bush Secu­ri­ties pro­vid­ing cov­er­age of the Enter­tain­ment Soft­ware, Enter­tain­ment Retail and Movies and Enter­tain­ment sectors.

Before join­ing Wed­bush Secu­ri­ties, Mr. Pachter served as the Direc­tor at Man­age­ment Resource Cen­ter, a middle-market invest­ment bank. Prior to that, Mr. Pachter spent 15 years in var­i­ous finan­cial and man­age­ment posi­tions at Atlantic Rich­field Com­pany, most recently as Direc­tor of Strate­gic Plan­ning. Mr. Pachter brings over 20 years of expe­ri­ence as a finance pro­fes­sional to Wed­bush Secu­ri­ties. Mr. Pachter has been rec­og­nized as StarMine’s Top Earn­ings Esti­ma­tor year after year and Best on the Street by the Wall Street Jour­nal.

Mr. Pachter 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.

David Cole

Founder & CEO, DFC Intelligence

David Cole is the founder and CEO of DFC Intel­li­gence, a research firm focused on track­ing dig­i­tal enter­tain­ment.  Since 1994, he has per­son­ally authored numer­ous reports on the video game and inter­ac­tive enter­tain­ment indus­try, spo­ken at lead­ing indus­try con­fer­ences and con­sulted with top com­pa­nies in the enter­tain­ment, telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions, invest­ment and con­sumer elec­tron­ics indus­tries.  Mr. Cole is one of the most widely quoted ana­lysts on video games, com­puter soft­ware and the Inter­net.  Mr. Cole has a BA in eco­nom­ics and indus­trial rela­tions, as well as a JD from the Uni­ver­sity of North Carolina. 

Eric Costa

Direc­tor of Finance, Harmonix

Eric is a finan­cial exec­u­tive in the con­sole games indus­try, presently with Har­monix Music Sys­tems and MTV Games, and pre­vi­ously with Rock­star New Eng­land and Mad Doc Soft­ware. As the CFO of Mad Doc Soft­ware, he led the com­pany through its acqui­si­tion by Rock­star Games. Eric has also served as the CFO of an elec­tron­ics engi­neer­ing and man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pany. In addi­tion to his finan­cial back­ground, Eric has worked in engi­neer­ing, man­u­fac­tur­ing man­age­ment, and was once the project man­ager of a NASA satel­lite. He also founded a wine import­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion com­pany. Eric has a BS in engi­neer­ing from MIT and an MBA from Stanford.

Hol­ly­wood, Music, and Gaming

Mod­ern War­fare 2, Halo: Reach, The Bea­t­les: Rock Band…. The biggest releases in the indus­try are built on the strength of major brands or have become mas­sive media prop­er­ties in their own right. Most of the major game pub­lish­ers have announced block­buster strate­gies, very sim­i­lar to the trans­for­ma­tion of the movie indus­try over the past ten years. What does this mean for the gam­ing indus­try as a whole? What trends and chal­lenges are on the hori­zon for Game Design­ers and Mar­keters? Our pan­elists will share their insight and best prac­tices for suc­ceed­ing in this new landscape.

Chris Weaver

Mod­er­a­tor, Bethesda Soft­works, MIT Faculty

Christo­pher Weaver is the Founder of Bethesda Soft­works, a soft­ware enter­tain­ment com­pany that has won every major national and inter­na­tional indus­try award, includ­ing over two hun­dred “Best Game of the Year” awards, the Codie, IGDA and ADC awards, two Clios and the Golden Cyber Lion at Cannes. Bethesda is cred­ited with the cre­ation of physics-based sports sim­u­la­tion and built the orig­i­nal John Mad­den Foot­ball, which has become the top-selling sports game of all time. Bethesda has also cre­ated over 75 other hit titles, includ­ing Grid­iron; Wayne Gret­zky Hockey; The Ter­mi­na­tor, Burnout Drag Rac­ing, NCAA Bas­ket­ball, and The Elder Scrolls — one of the best-selling role-playing series in the his­tory of com­puter games as well as Fall­out 3.

Weaver received his SM in Engi­neer­ing from MIT and was the first Dal­try Scholar at Wes­leyan Uni­ver­sity, where he earned dual Mas­ters Degrees in Japan­ese Eth­no­mu­si­col­ogy and Com­puter Sci­ence and a dual CAS Doc­toral Degree in Japan­ese and Physics. An author and advi­sor to gov­ern­ment and indus­try, he holds patents in inter­ac­tive media, sys­tem secu­rity and broad­band communications.

A for­mer mem­ber of the Archi­tec­ture Machine Group and Fel­low of the MIT Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Pol­icy Pro­gram, Weaver was a Fel­low of the Robot­ics Sim­u­la­tion Lab­o­ra­tory at Carnegie Mel­lon and cur­rently teaches at MIT in the Com­par­a­tive Media Stud­ies pro­gram and as a Lec­turer in Engi­neer­ing. He is a Board Mem­ber of the MIT Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Tech­nol­ogy Roadmap group and a Vis­it­ing Sci­en­tist in the Micropho­ton­ics Cen­ter. In 2005, he was inducted into the Cos­mos Club for excel­lence in engineering.

Mike Dorn­brook

COO, Har­monix

Often referred to as Harmonix’s “adult super­vi­sion” or its mas­ter of “the bor­ing stuff,” Mike is respon­si­ble for Harmonix’s Finance and Admin­is­tra­tion. He has han­dled most of the major deals, such as the game pub­lish­ing con­tracts and the Chi­nese man­u­fac­tur­ing of all the drums and gui­tars. Pre­vi­ously he headed up Infocom’s mar­ket­ing through most of the 1980s, launch­ing over forty Top-10 best­sellers, and he is par­tic­u­larly proud of cham­pi­oning The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Leather God­desses of Pho­bos. Before join­ing Har­monix in 1997, he was co-founder and pres­i­dent of Boffo Games, best known for The Space Bar. He loves to spend as much time as he can spare work­ing out­doors at his retreat in north­ern Vermont.

Paul Neu­rath

Owner/Creative Direc­tor, Flood­gate Entertainment

Paul Neu­rath, founder and Cre­ative Direc­tor of Flood­gate Enter­tain­ment, is an 20-year vet­eran of the inter­ac­tive enter­tain­ment indus­try. He started mak­ing videogames in the mid-1980s as an inde­pen­dent game author who cre­ated sev­eral award win­ning com­puter games. In 1990 he founded Blue Sky Pro­duc­tions, which was later renamed to Look­ing­Glass, and became a lead­ing US game devel­op­ment stu­dio. Look­ing­Glass devel­oped 18 titles and gen­er­ated over $120M in sales. As Cre­ative Direc­tor of the stu­dio, Paul designed and directed the devel­op­ment of such acclaimed titles as Ultima Under­world, Terra Nova, Flight Unlim­ited, and Thief, which col­lec­tively earned over a dozen game-of-the-year awards. He was also instru­men­tal in pio­neer­ing break­through gam­ing tech­nolo­gies, includ­ing 3D tex­ture map­ping and pho­to­re­al­is­tic ter­rain. As the founder and Cre­ative Direc­tor of Flood­Gate Enter­tain­ment, Paul over­sees all design, devel­op­ment and research efforts of the company.

Mark Blecher

GM and SVP, Has­bro Dig­i­tal Media & Gaming

Mark Blecher is the Gen­eral Man­ager Hasbro’s Dig­i­tal Media and Gam­ing busi­ness unit. In this role he over­sees Hasbro’s part­ner and licens­ing efforts in the dig­i­tal game indus­try. He is also lead­ing the launch efforts for Has­bro and Discovery’s new online enter­tain­ment busi­ness, which will accom­pany the two company’s joint ven­ture cable network.

Blecher has exten­sive mar­ket­ing and lead­er­ship expe­ri­ence. Prior to join­ing Has­bro in 2004, he was with Kodak, where he was Pres­i­dent of their Ofoto photo devel­op­ment ser­vice divi­sion based out­side of San Fran­cisco. At Kodak, he designed strate­gies and pro­grams that enabled Ofoto to cap­i­tal­ize on the the growth of dig­i­tal cam­eras and achieve true mass-market penetration.

Pre­vi­ously, Blecher served as Vice Pres­i­dent of Mar­ket­ing for Elec­tronic Arts’s con­sole busi­ness and then as Vice Pres­i­dent of Mar­ket­ing and Ad Sales for EA’s inter­net games busi­ness. Prior to EA, Blecher spent 12 years work­ing for pack­aged goods com­pa­nies, hold­ing man­age­ment posi­tions at Pep­siCo and The Clorox Company.

Blecher is a grad­u­ate of the Uni­ver­sity of Pennsylvania’s Whar­ton School where he received his Bach­e­lor of Sci­ence degree in Eco­nom­ics. He also holds an MBA from the Har­vard Busi­ness School.

Ian Davis

Pres­i­dent, Rock­star New Eng­land, Rock­star Games

Dr. Ian Lane Davis is cur­rently the Pres­i­dent of Rock­star New Eng­land, a stu­dio within Rock­star Games. He was for­merly CEO and Founder of Mad Doc® Soft­ware (acquired by Rock­star), Cre­ative Direc­tor on the crit­i­cally acclaimed Empire Earth® II, and for­mer Tech­ni­cal Direc­tor at Activision’s Santa Mon­ica stu­dio, and is widely acknowl­edged as one of the top Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence experts in the video game indus­try. His direct cred­its include Bully: Schol­ar­ship Edi­tion, Star Trek Legacy, Empire Earth® II (a PC Gamer Editor’s Choice Award win­ner), the Acad­emy of Inter­ac­tive Arts and Sci­ences Com­puter Role Play­ing Game of the Year Final­ist: Dun­geon Siege®: Leg­ends of Aranna™; Empire Earth: The Art of Con­quest™; and Star Trek®: Armada II™, among others.

Cur­rently co-authoring the defin­i­tive AI and games text­book for aca­d­e­mic and indus­try train­ing, Dr. Davis is a trusted advi­sor to key indus­try pub­lish­ers, serves as a Peer Panel Leader for the AIAS Peer Panel for Game­play Engi­neer­ing, was Editor-in-Chief of the Jour­nal of Game Devel­op­ment for two years, and is a fre­quent guest pro­fes­sor at MIT. A highly sought speaker who presents in aca­d­e­mic and game-focused venues, Davis earned his doc­tor­ate in AI and Robot­ics from Carnegie Mel­lon University

Rad­i­cal Approaches to Game Marketing

This panel will dis­cuss how untra­di­tional mar­ket­ing meth­ods have helped turn good game mar­ket­ing into great game mar­ket­ing. The dis­cus­sion will include exam­ples from top titles, and will explore the ratio­nale behind the decisions.

Dan Lazar

Mod­er­a­tor, Part­ner, Chat­ter, Inc.

Dan Lazar is the Los Ange­les Man­ag­ing Part­ner of Chat­ter Inc., a full-service research and strat­egy con­sul­tancy to the videogame indus­try. Dan is a fore­most expert at mar­ry­ing con­sumer insights with game devel­op­ment and brand strat­egy. In this role he has worked on some of the biggest brands in gam­ing, includ­ing Spore, Gui­tar Hero, BioShock, Tony Hawk, Call of Duty, Spider-Man, Wolfen­stein, God of War, Twisted Metal, Heav­enly Sword, Kil­l­zone, Sonic the Hedge­hog, and oth­ers. He began his career in gam­ing at Activi­sion, where he was on the brand teams for Call of Duty and Shrek. This expe­ri­ence has helped him deliver uniquely action­able consumer-driven strate­gic insights to a host of gam­ing clients, includ­ing Elec­tronic Arts, Activi­sion, SCEA, SEGA, Dis­ney Inter­ac­tive Stu­dios, Irra­tional Games, Warner Bros. Inter­ac­tive, and oth­ers. Dan’s exten­sive research and strat­egy track record spans male and female gamers, kids and adults, and all gen­res and plat­forms. On aver­age, Dan speaks with over 150 gamers a month in a research setting.

Dan holds a BA from UC Davis and an MBA from the Mar­shall School of Busi­ness at USC.

Leonie Man­shan­den

Mar­ket­ing Direc­tor, Irra­tional Games

As the Direc­tor of Mar­ket­ing for Irra­tional Games, Leonie Man­shan­den works along­side Cre­ative Direc­tor Ken Levine and over­sees the strate­gic devel­op­ment of all the mar­ket­ing and PR for the studio’s projects.

She also over­sees www.irrationalgames.com which is rapidly grow­ing with the release of pod­casts and its open approach to con­sumer communications.

Prior to Irra­tional Games, Leonie has held lead­ing posi­tions in both the US and Euro­pean mar­kets at Sony Music, Activi­sion and Mid­way Games. Her drive to imple­ment sound strate­gies focused on results, has con­tributed to the suc­cess of over 40 brands. She was hon­ored by MCV – Trade Mag­a­zine for the UK games indus­try, in their top ’30 under 30’ in 2008.

Adam Mer­sky

Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, Turbine

Adam Mer­sky is the Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions for Tur­bine, Inc., the largest pri­vately held online game stu­dio in North Amer­ica.  Prior to join­ing Tur­bine, Adam was the Man­ag­ing Direc­tor of the Boston office of Voce Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, a lead­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions con­sul­tancy.  Charged with oper­at­ing the east coast oper­a­tions, Adam also ser­viced lead­ing orga­ni­za­tions includ­ing Yahoo!, Dis­cov­ery Net­works and NEC.  Prior to his work at Voce, Adam served as the Direc­tor of Pub­lic Rela­tions for Get­Con­nected, Inc., the lead­ing provider of soft­ware solu­tions and ser­vices that enable retail­ers, e-tailers, OEMs, cat­a­logers and call cen­ters to quickly and cost-effectively sell broad­band, wire­less hand­sets and ser­vices and land­line tele­phony. Adam also has served in senior roles at Shand­wick Inter­na­tional where he helped develop and deploy the pub­lic rela­tions pro­gram for sev­eral of the enter­prise com­put­ing divi­sions at Com­paq Com­puter.  He has man­aged pub­lic rela­tions and event man­age­ment ser­vices for Dun and Brad­street, Ora­cle, Dig­i­tal Equip­ment Corp., Art Tech­nol­ogy Group, British Air­ways, Con­ti­nen­tal Air­lines, Capi­tol Records and Rhino Records.

Chris Enock

Mar­ket­ing Direc­tor, Riot Games

Chris Enock is the Mar­ket­ing Direc­tor of Riot Games, respon­si­ble for both the mar­ket­ing and mon­e­ti­za­tion of League of Leg­ends (win­ner of IGN’s Reader’s Choice awards for “Best Strat­egy” and “Best Mul­ti­player PC Game”).  With a nine year his­tory in the video games indus­try and an MBA from the Kel­logg School of Man­age­ment, Chris has worked in mar­ket­ing for EA and Activi­sion, most recently as a Global Brand Man­ager on Gui­tar Hero.

Riot Games is a direct-to-consumer video game devel­oper and pub­lisher of pre­mium, com­pet­i­tive online games. Riot Games, based in Los Ange­les, is funded through ven­ture cap­i­tal firms Bench­mark Cap­i­tal and First­mark Cap­i­tal and China’s largest online ser­vices corporation, Tencent. The com­pany was estab­lished in 2006 and has quickly become a lead­ing global devel­oper and pub­lisher of pre­mium free-to-play online video games for hard­core gamers, launch­ing their debut title, League of Leg­ends, in Octo­ber 2009. To date, more than 1 mil­lion gamers play League of Leg­ends and log more than half a bil­lion min­utes of play­time each month.

Mass Effect: The State of the Gam­ing Indus­try in Massachusetts

Alex Aber of Foley Hoag LLP, out­side gen­eral coun­sel to 38 Stu­dios, LLC, will lead this dis­tin­guished panel of video game vet­er­ans in a lively dis­cus­sion of the state of the indus­try in Mass­a­chu­setts.  From the per­spec­tive of local star­tups to mature multi­na­tion­als to gov­ern­ment insid­ers, we’ll dis­cuss why — in the words of Gov­er­nor Deval Patrick – the video game indus­try is on fire in Mass­a­chu­setts.  Pan­elists will opine on the thriv­ing Bay State video game ecosys­tem and the fac­tors that make this an ideal loca­tion for devel­op­ment stage and mature com­pa­nies alike — from the avail­abil­ity of tal­ent and the avail­abil­ity of cap­i­tal to the broad indus­try sup­port on Bea­con Hill. 

Alex Aber

Mod­er­a­tor, Foley Hoag

Alex Aber con­cen­trates his prac­tice on merg­ers and acqui­si­tions and cor­po­rate finance and has exten­sive expe­ri­ence rep­re­sent­ing pub­lic and pri­vate com­pany buy­ers and sell­ers in domes­tic and cross-border merg­ers and acqui­si­tions and other strate­gic busi­ness transactions.

Alex also advises founders and investors in early stage and mature tech­nol­ogy and life sci­ence com­pa­nies on a broad range of mat­ters includ­ing cor­po­rate gov­er­nance and man­age­ment, equity and debt financ­ing trans­ac­tions, tech­nol­ogy licens­ing, joint ven­tures, and gen­eral legal matters.

Alex serves as out­side gen­eral coun­sel to 38 Stu­dios, LLC and Good Start Genet­ics, Inc. and recently com­pleted a sec­ond­ment with The Gen­eral Counsel’s Office of EMC Cor­po­ra­tion in which he rep­re­sented EMC in var­i­ous pub­lic and pri­vate com­pany acqui­si­tions and strate­gic investments.

Curt Schilling

Founder and Chair­man, 38 Studios

You might think Curt Schillings biggest call­ing in life has been Major League Base­ball, but the three-time World Series cham­pion and six-time MLB All-Star is equally pas­sion­ate about video games. You can often find Curt play­ing an MMOG on his lap­top — it’s some­thing he’s been doing since he was a teenager. Curt became involved in the busi­ness end of the indus­try over a decade ago when he formed a rela­tion­ship with Sony Online Enter­tain­ment. In 2003 and 2004 Curt served as the offi­cial spokesper­son for the 3DO Company’s High Heat Base­ball. Curt brought this love for gam­ing to life by found­ing 38 Stu­dios in 2006.

In addi­tion to this indus­try expe­ri­ence, Curt brings another unique per­spec­tive to the table: he has the instinct to rec­og­nize tal­ent and lead a cham­pi­onship team. Curt and his wife Shonda are pas­sion­ate phil­an­thropists and have raised over $10 mil­lion to fight ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Dis­ease) through Curt’s Pitch for ALS (www.curtspitch.com), as well as encour­ag­ing aware­ness for sun pro­tec­tion through the SHADE Foun­da­tion (www.shadefoundation.org).

Respected world­wide for his ded­i­ca­tion to win­ning and his com­mit­ment to phil­an­thropic causes, Curt is assem­bling a team to cre­ate some­thing extra­or­di­nary with 38 Stu­dios.

Jason Schup­bach

Cre­ative Econ­omy Indus­try Direc­tor, MA Depart­ment of Busi­ness Development

Jason Schup­bach is the Cre­ative Econ­omy and Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy Indus­try Direc­tor at the Mass­a­chu­setts Depart­ment of Busi­ness Devel­op­ment. In this job he focuses on the nexus of cre­ativ­ity, inno­va­tion and tech­nol­ogy to grow the inno­va­tion indus­tries clus­ter in the state, includ­ing soft­ware, hard­ware, film, tv, dig­i­tal media, videogames, design, adver­tis­ing, music, and pub­lish­ing busi­nesses. He for­merly was the direc­tor of ArtistLink, a Ford Foun­da­tion ini­tia­tive to sta­bi­lize and revi­tal­ize com­mu­ni­ties through the cre­ation of afford­able space and inno­v­a­tive envi­ron­ments for cre­ative entrepreneurs.

Jason worked for the mayor’s office and Depart­ment of Cul­tural Affairs in Chicago, and he was the staff urban plan­ner and cap­i­tal projects man­ager for the Depart­ment of Cul­tural Affairs in New York City. Jason has a degree in pub­lic health from the Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina at Chapel Hill and a master’s degree in city plan­ning from MIT. Jason is grad­u­ate of the UMASS Cen­ter for Col­lab­o­ra­tive Emerg­ing Lead­er­ship and was recip­i­ent of the MIT Excel­lence in Pub­lic Ser­vice Award.

Bob Fer­arri

VP Global Pub­lish­ing and Busi­ness Devel­op­ment, San­rio Digital

Robert Fer­rari serves as VP Global Pub­lish­ing and Busi­ness Devel­op­ment at San­rio Dig­i­tal, as well as VP Busi­ness Devel­op­ment at the company’s joint ven­ture part­ner — Typhoon Games. San­rio Dig­i­tal focuses on the pub­lish­ing of inter­ac­tive enter­tain­ment based on the world renowned Hello Kitty® and San­rio brands. The com­pany holds a lead­er­ship posi­tion cre­at­ing the con­ver­gence of vir­tual worlds, MMOs and social net­work­ing for a truly inte­grated social gam­ing solu­tion. Typhoon Games is a pre­mier game devel­op­ment stu­dio for lead­ing MMO brands such as Hello Kitty Online from San­rio Dig­i­tal, and Ben 10 Omni­verse and Tom & Jerry Online from TurnOut Ventures.

Based in Boston MA, Fer­rari over­sees the company’s global pub­lish­ing and busi­ness devel­op­ment ini­tia­tives across PC, con­sole and hand­held plat­forms. Fer­rari brings a wealth of global busi­ness expe­ri­ence to San­rio Dig­i­tal and Typhoon Games as a well-known and highly respected indus­try vet­eran and exec­u­tive within the online games sector.

Fer­rari was pre­vi­ously VP Busi­ness Devel­op­ment at Tur­bine Inc. a lead­ing pub­lisher and devel­oper of mas­sively mul­ti­player online games. Hav­ing joined Tur­bine back in 2004, Fer­rari was instru­men­tal in the company’s hyper growth, global expan­sion, strate­gic part­ner­ships, self-publishing tran­si­tion, licens­ing, dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion, and tra­di­tional retail chan­nel ini­tia­tives. His efforts con­tributed to the suc­cess of Turbine’s award-winning online games, includ­ing The Lord of the Rings Online™, Dun­geons & Drag­ons Online™: Storm­reach™ and Asheron’s Call®. Pre­vi­ous to his tenure at Tur­bine, Fer­rari held senior exec­u­tive roles at inter­ac­tive media and con­sumer prod­uct com­pa­nies such as Philips Elec­tron­ics (NYSE:PHG), Web­surfer Inc, and Mer­inta Inc.

Fer­rari is an active and high pro­file indus­try speaker. He serves on the exec com­mit­tee of the MIT/NE Games and Inter­ac­tive Enter­tain­ment SIG, as well as the Mass­a­chu­setts Tech Lead­er­ship Council/Entertainment Sector.

Brian Bal­four

Founder, VP Prod­uct Mar­keting, Vix­imo

Brian Bal­four is the Founder and VP Prod­uct Mar­ket­ing of Vix­imo which pro­vides vir­tual good solu­tions to social net­work­ing, online dat­ing, and casual gam­ing sites that enable and grow their vir­tual goods rev­enue. Prior to found­ing Vix­imo, Brian man­aged new prod­uct ini­tia­tives at Zoom­Info, and was founder of mul­ti­ple online com­mu­nity star­tups, includ­ing the first col­lege spe­cific social net­work in early 2003. In addi­tion, as a found­ing mem­ber of Beta­house, a co-working space for tech­nol­ogy entre­pre­neurs, and co-founder of PopSig­nal, one of Boston’s largest pro­fes­sional net­work­ing orga­ni­za­tions, Brian is actively con­tribut­ing to the growth of Boston’s tech­nol­ogy startup scene. Brian holds Bachelor’s degrees in Sports Busi­ness, Eco­nom­ics, and Applied Sta­tis­tics from the Uni­ver­sity of Michigan.

Tom Dusen­berry

Founder, Dusen­berry Entertainment

Tom Dusen­berry is the Founder of Dusen­berry Enter­tain­ment. He has been involved in the games indus­try for the past 30 years. A for­mer CEO and Pres­i­dent (1995 — 2001) of Has­bro Inter­ac­tive, Mr. Dusen­berry has a proven track record for build­ing excep­tional teams and achiev­ing extra­or­di­nary busi­ness results in a fast-paced, evolv­ing inter­ac­tive indus­try. He is a cre­ative strate­gic thinker who can expand exist­ing mar­kets and develop new mar­kets. His career focus in con­sumer elec­tron­ics and media con­tent appli­ca­tions includes elec­tronic games, video con­sole games, video hand-held games, CD-ROM/DVD, inter­net games, wire­less enter­tain­ment, FLASH ani­ma­tion, inter­ac­tive toys and motion based entertainment.