The new golden age of gaming. It has a nice ring to it, and that’s why the organizers of the high-end game conference the DICE Summit are using it as their theme for next year’s conference.
“It’s really an incredibly opportunistic age for the industry as a whole,” said Martin Rae, the president of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences (AIAS) and an organizer of the summit, in an interview with GamesBeat. “In the past, people asked me before how you can call this a new age of gaming. I got push-back because people pointed out it was a time of turmoil and declining retail sales.”
The DICE Summit draws hundreds of elite game developers and industry executives each spring. The 13th annual DICE (short for Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) will be held Feb. 4 to Feb. 6 in Las Vegas at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino. Registration opens today, and the organization announced its first speakers today.
Rae said it’s a golden age — a reference to the early days of arcade games in the 1970s — because “great products are going to grow up around the great new audience of people who are picking up gaming for the first time.” Rae will moderate our session on new game investments at our GamesBeat 2013 conference on Oct. 29-Oct. 30.
He said, “Even the people in turmoil are going to benefit from targeting these new markets. They will have a whole new generation of game players, and that’s why we have this theme.”
The first round of speakers announced today includes David Helgason, the chief executive of Unity Technologies; Ed Fries, the co-creator of the Xbox; Clive Downie, the CEO of DeNA West; and Sundance DiGiovanni, the CEO of Major League Gaming.
“In the intellectual discourse around DICE, this theme and these speakers will be really compelling,” Rae said.
The AIAS recently held its first DICE Europe event. The London conference was livestreamed on Twitch and received 150,000 unique views, Rae said.