CEO Yoichi Wada of disruptive startup Shinra joins GamesBeat Summit (May 5-6)

We’ve added more stellar speakers to the roster for GamesBeat Summit coming up on May 5 and May 6. Taking place at the scenic Cavallo Resort just north of San Francisco, this is an intimate, invite-only event designed to promote open dialogue and debate among senior-level peers. See if you qualify here.

We’re excited to announce that Shinra Technologies founder and chief executive Yoichi Wada, along with his senior vice president of business development, Jacob Navok, will be joining us in a fireside chat.

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Shinra has a technological story, but it’s also about growth, the larger theme behind VentureBeat’s events this year. If Shinra can enable small developers to pull off massive virtual worlds, it will help reset a lot of costs in the industry. It will enable small indie companies a chance to create enthralling virtual worlds and find new users around the globe, drawing them in with cool new gaming technology. That’s a challenge that all game companies are thinking about.

Earlier this month at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Shinra showed off a working demo of its cloud supercomputer. Breaking the one-processor, one-user model, Shinra’s technology will enable developers to create huge worlds that can measure as much as 20 miles-by-20 miles of virtual space — and can host as many as 16,000 unique characters with individual artificial intelligence at the same time. It’s not a stretch to consider Shinra’s transformative vision as bringing the full power of Hollywood-scale graphics to gaming while allowing a shared landscape of thousands.

Wada’s newest startup is spun out from Square Enix, where he was president and CEO. Square Enix is, of course, responsible for selling more than 100 million Final Fantasy games over the years. He led the company for 13 years before launching Shinra and also helped shape the game business community as chairman of the Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Assocation from 2006 to 2012.

Navok worked closely with Wada during his past five years at Square Enix in Tokyo, where he was responsible for corporate business development — and has now joined Wada in and Shinra in their goal to revolutionize gaming.

Some of our speakers 

David Haddad, the executive vice president and general manager of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and Peter Levin, the president of interactive media and games at Lionsgate, will be on hand for a couple of those main stage discussions.

Unity Technologies CEO John Riccitiello will also be at the Summit. Unity is one of the most important companies in game development thanks to its Unity game engine, a cross-platform technology that enables developers to make works for just about any device that plays games. The company recently announced its Unity 5 tools at the Game Developers Conference 2015 in San Francisco.

Few people have had as much influence on the game industry over the last 20 years as Riccitiello. He served as the chief operating officer for gaming giant EA in his first stint at the company and returned to be its CEO, helping the publisher as it became a major player in the mobile and online gaming sectors.

Also speaking at the Summit is Thomas Hartwig, cofounder and chief technical officer of King, one of the biggest publishers of mobile games. King was the No. 2 mobile game publisher in the world for 2014, thanks in part to its major hit Candy Crush Saga. If you play games on your phone or tablet, chances are good that you’ve crushed some candy on it since its 2012 release. And Hartwig’s role at King has helped change how we play games — and pay for them — on our mobile devices.

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The focus of GamesBeat Summit is on bold ideas, the kind that will propel the industry forward, particularly in a global context. Limited to only 180 senior execs, we’re looking forward to the kind of open sharing that happens when like-minded visionaries come together.

For more info and to see if you qualify, go here.