Get ready for some real news at GamesBeat@GDC

We’ve been busy keeping our heads down pulling together our program for GamesBeat@GDC, our game conference next Wednesday, March 10, inside the Game Developers Conference at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.

Note: Online registration is closed but you can still register on site. Monday onsite registration is 5-7 pm and Tuesday and Wednesday, on-site registration is open all day. Reminder: A press pass for GDC or an All-Access Pass for GDC can get you into GamesBeat@GDC. You can also get a GamesBeat only pass by registering on site now.

Now that our speakers are booked, we can say that we’re thrilled to have a line-up of entertaining speakers, but some real news makers doing disruptive things in the game industry. This isn’t a conference where you’re only going to hear people rehash what has happened in the last six months. It’s going to be meaty.

Steve Perlman, the chief executive of OnLive, will open the conference with the latest on his games-on-demand service that could disrupt traditional retail stores and high-end hardware thanks to technology that allows games to live as a service in the cloud.

We’ll hear from Brian Reynolds, chief designer at Zynga, the biggest social gaming company on Facebook. He can talk about making the jump from designing hardcore games to designing service-oriented games for casual audiences on social networks. On top of that, we’ll hear from Jeff Tseng, co-founder of Crowdstar and another hardcore game designer who has seen overnight success with Happy Aquarium on Facebook. Tseng hasn’t taken the stage anywhere to talk about this mysterious startup, funded by uber-social-game investor Peter Relan.

Relan himself will talk on stage about disruptive game platforms. Since Apple hasn’t built a social network into the iPhone, another one of Relan’s companies, Sibblingz, is trying to do that. If it succeeds, then the iPhone could follow in Facebook’s shoes, leading mobile game companies to great glory. Of course, Google has a thing or two to say about who will reach mobile gaming nirvana. The company is making a full-court press to embrace game developers at the GDC, giving away free Nexus One phones to many attendees. We’ll hear from Eric Chu, group manager of the Android platform at Google. We’ll also hear from iPhone game makers Bart Decrem of Tapulous and Neil Young of Ngmoco as they talk about the future of Apple’s platforms, including the most-talked about product of the year, the iPad.

These are the people that are hot now. Gareth Davis, platform manager at Facebook, can talk about where his platform, which is disrupting the console business and casual game sites, will go next. Was the recent addition of a Game Dashboard to Facebook’s interface a success? You can ask him at GamesBeat@GDC. You can also hear from Jack Buser, head of Sony’s Home virtual world and social gaming business, about how Sony is going to adapt to the new world of virtual goods, micro-transactions, and free-to-play games. We will hear from some of the leading minds among investors who had great success investing in games.

And you’re going to hear from a diversity of opinions as well. Alex St. John, president and chief technology officer at social network hi5, is going to argue that you should not count his company out this early in the new era of social gaming. Facebook hasn’t crushed everybody else yet, and perhaps there is a reason for developers to support more than just one platform. St. John will be talking about the company’s new Facebook API and the hi5 game developer program.

And Jules Urbach, chief executive of Otoy, may challenge the world view of Steve Perlman and try to deliver digital distribution and games on demand in a different way. We will also see new kinds of gesture-control schemes from Sixense and hear from Unity Technologies’ David Helgason on disrupting 3-D download games with a browser-based 3-D game engine.

I look forward to hearing different perspectives on games from around the globe. Our panel on Gaming Without Borders, moderated by veteran Asia analyst Lisa Cosmas Hanson, will break out of our U.S.-centric view of video games with speakers from Japan, Singapore, Germany, and Korea.

We have the people who are associated with blockbuster games. John Schappert, chief operating officer of Electronic Arts, will do a fireside chat about adapting to this new age of games. Spike TV personality Geoff Keighley will interview Ray Muzyka, who just had a dual smashing success with the launch of Mass Effect 2 and Dragons Age Origins, and Joseph Staten, design director at Bungie and one of the creative forces behind the 30-million-units-and-growing Halo franchise.

I am as excited as I ever have been about the video game business and I am honored that we have speakers who are at the center of it, and at the edge of it as well. And as I said at the top, you’re going to hear new things from these speakers if you make it to our event. Lastly, I am happy that we are going to hear from five new companies that represent the future generation of leaders in the game business as we close the event with our second annual Who’s Got Game? contest for the best game startup.

Above all, we hope you hear some ideas about disruption and what makes it happen in the video game business. What are the rules that have to be broken? What is the craziest thing that can happen in the video game business, and who should make sure that it happens?

For more conference info, check out our GamesBeat 2010 web site and our Facebook Group for GamesBeat@GDC. Our sponsors include the Georgia Department of Economic Development, PlaySpan, AdMob, and hi5.