Thank you for making the inaugural GamesBeat Summit a success

Thanks to those of you who attended the GamesBeat Summit a success. Our executive event at the Cavallo Point resort in Sausalito, Calif., drew the industry together for leadership around our themes of growth, bold ideas, and transparency.

We had more than 200 attendees, including about 60 chief executives. We had 20 stellar speakers, 11 moderators and facilitators, and 12 roundtable chairpeople. But as I noted in my opening speech below, it wasn’t about how many people were there, but who was in the room. In that respect, the event was a great start for an ongoing conversation that we hope to continue with the industry’s leadership.

You can see GamesBeat’s coverage of the event here. My own perspective is in the latest DeanBeat column. We had six boardroom session roundtables on platforms, international expansion, brands and franchises, monetization, understanding gamers, and deals. Tim Merel of Digi-Capital kicked off the event with a prediction that augmented reality and virtual reality would be a $150 billion business. That opened the way for a funny and insightful conversation with Atari founder Nolan Bushnell. We had popular talks by John Riccitiello, the CEO of Unity Technologies; Kate Edwards, the executive director of the International Game Developers Association; and Adam Boyes, the vice president of publisher and developer relations at Sony’s U.S. game division. I can’t highlight all of them here, but I’d encourage you to read some of stories on the speakers by Gavin Greene and others.

And now we’re getting ready for GamesBeat 2015, which takes place at the Grand Hyatt Union Square in San Francisco on Oct. 12 and Oct. 13. We’ve listed our first speakers at the bottom. And don’t forget VentureBeat’s next event, the GrowthBeat Summit on June 1 and June 2 in Boston.

Most of all, I’d just like to say thank you to our advisers, attendees, speakers, sponsors, and readers! If you’d like to leave feedback, here’s the link.

My opening speech

Above: Dean Takahashi at the GamesBeat Summit.

Image Credit: Michael O'Donnell/VentureBeat

Thank you for coming to the first annual GamesBeat Summit.

I’d like to celebrate the very fact that we made it this far, and we got you all in this lovely place. Our mission was to get the right people in the room. Yesterday, I counted 57 CEOs among our attendees. If we were any more strict about who could be here, I would have to leave.

I’d like to thank the people who made this happen and recruited their peers to come, including our very helpful advisory board.

Our theme is “Bold Ideas in Gaming,” or the concepts that will help the game industry grow and become even more of a powerhouse than it already is. Our overarching theme for all our conferences this year is growth. For us, it’s about how companies can seize the opportunities to grow in gaming’s golden age. John Riccitiello, the CEO of Unity and one of our advisers, suggested the more detailed theme on bold ideas. If you don’t like it, well, he gets part of the blame.

This participatory event is about giving you insights into the opportunities and choices before you. You can interrupt with questions. We’ve built plenty of networking time into the receptions, meals, breaks, and the party.

We’ve got 19 speakers, 15 chairpeople for boardroom roundtable sessions, and a total of about 180 attendees over a day and a half. It’s a more intimate gathering where we don’t measure how many people are in the room but who is in the room.

This is in keeping with GamesBeat’s own growing influence. We aren’t the biggest gaming publication. But I rank No. 10 in the world for social reach in games journalism, as measured by influencer marketing platform Traackr. And no, I’m not going to tell you who the other nine more influential journalists are. Stewart Rogers of VB Insight has done a report on influencers, and it is included as part of the free reports that you are getting today.

I want to thank our sponsors including RockYou, Samsung, King, Supersonic, MAG, Delinquent, Hutch, GetSocial, Pollen VC, Next Games, and Flaregames. They’re taking a risk on a first-time event, but I hope they’re recognizing that it is important to reach the influential people here. Targeted influence marketing is in, and when you measure influence, GamesBeat shows up very high on the scoreboard.

Now, whenever my ego runs unchecked, I have to come back down to earth. My three daughters and wife let me know who’s boss every day. By day, I’m big on the Internet. On the weekends, I’m the errand boy with the car keys. And GamesBeat is not just me.

We run more than 90 stories in a week now, and I’ll write less than 30 of them. GamesBeat has five full-timers and a dozen freelancers, and three of us run it jointly: me, our senior editor Dale North, and managing editor Jason Wilson. I’m very proud of the collective influence that our team has.

While we want to target influencers, we don’t want to be purely exclusive. For our fall event, we target over 500 people and 80 speakers for our GamesBeat 2015 conference, which is Oct. 12 and Oct. 13 in San Francisco. We’ll post shortly on the first speakers for that event. There’s something to be said for embracing both influence and a diversity of ideas too. Yes, diversity is a good thing.

When I started thinking about this event, I was struck at how many billion-dollar deals were happening. SoftBank and Supercell. Microsoft and Mojang. Amazon and Twitch. Churchill Downs and Big Fish Games. We wanted to get the right people in the room to make more of these billion-dollar deals happen. We want to get their insights and perspective about the future of gaming.

We count things in the billions now. Apple pays out $10 billion a year to its app store developers now. Supercell generated $1.7 billion in revenue last year from just three mobile games. Kim Kardashian: Hollywood from Glu Mobile has unleashed a wave of celebrity and brand-related games in mobile. Unfortunately, Chris Akhavan from Glu showed up today without either Britney Spears or Katy Perry. So the industry has the attention of outside brands and giant companies like never before. The question becomes: How do we make the deal numbers go into the tens of billions of dollars?

Will the new age of marketing technology, user acquisition, and predictive targeting get us there? Or will it be old-fashioned awesome game design? Do the Hollywood licensors hold the power, or do the emerging game studios in the rest of the world hold it?

We may talk about these questions. Or you can change the subject and talk about what you really want to discuss. We’re trying to strike a balance between a focused event with a unconference” feel.

We hope you come away with this feeling like you’ve got the right information and perspectives to make good choices and come up with bold ideas.

Thank you so much for coming. And lastly, I’d like to thank our VentureBeat staff like Amy Nichols, Briana Billingham, Katie Donnel, our great sales team, and Evergreen Creative, our AV & Production Partners for making this happen. Thanks also to Matt Marshall, Dylan Tweney, John Koestier, Stewart Rogers, Dale North, Jason Wilson, and our GamesBeat writers.

This conference is, collectively, our bold idea. But all we did here was get the conversation started. What is your bold idea?

First speakers for GamesBeat 2015

Above: Manish Agarwal, CEO of Reliance Games.

Image Credit: Reliance Games

Our next GamesBeat 2015 event is coming on Oct. 12 and Oct. 13 at the Grand Hyatt Square Hotel in San Francisco.

Our first speakers for the fall event include:

• Manish Agarwal, CEO of Reliance Games
• Niccolo De. Masi, CEO of Glu Mobile
• Emily Greer, head of Kongregate
• Rajesh Rao, CEO of GameTantra
• Jessica Rovello, CEO of Arkadium
• Brianna Wu, head of development at Giant Spacekat

Special thanks to our advisory board

Our advisers included:

John Riccitiello, CEO of Unity; Michael Chang, senior vice president of corporate development at NCSoft West; Phil Sanderson, managing director of IDG Ventures; Jay Eum, managing director of TransLink Capital; James Hursthouse, CEO of Roadhouse Interactive; Michael Metzger, principal at MESA Global; Sunny Dhillon and Rick Thomson of Signia Venture Partners; Walter Driver, CEO of Scopely; Keith Boesky, founder of Boesky & Co.; Terence Fung, chief strategy officer of Storm8; Reinout te Brake, CEO of Get Social; and Riccardo Zacconi, chief executive of King.

And please check out the photo gallery below: