Bringing joy during a difficult time for the world | Dean Takahashi’s GamesBeat Next speech

24.10.2023 - 17:07 / venturebeat.com

This is Dean Takahashi’s opening speech for the GamesBeat Next 2023 event, taking place today in San Francisco.

Thank you all so much for coming to our event to celebrate gaming. I’m so happy you chose to come here in person.

I’m delighted we just held our seventh Women in Gaming breakfast and the fourth with actual food. It’s an honor and privilege to host this breakfast that draws so many women in the industry. We see this breakfast as a safe place where women can drink from the well of inspiration and share food for thought. Thanks to Rachel Kaser for hosting it once again and for enabling me to retire from cosplaying.

This is our third GamesBeat Next event and the second one in person. We’re still here to mark your progress and offer encouragement for entrepreneurs and builders. GamesBeat itself is in its 15th year, and we are consciously moving toward community celebration. This is our shelter from reality.

GamesBeat Next 2023

Join the GamesBeat community in San Francisco this October 23-24. You’ll hear from the brightest minds within the gaming industry on latest developments and their take on the future of gaming.

Lightspeed has organized the Game Changers top startups list, and that allows us to celebrate the best game startups for the first time in years. At the very end of our event, Lightspeed’s Moritz Baier-Lentz and I, along with some of our all-star judges, will unveil the 25 top game startups across five categories and celebrate the final five winners on stage for each category.

Our theme is Playing The Edge. That fits well with the purpose of GamesBeat Next. While our GamesBeat Summit event in LA in May 2024 will focus on the core of the game industry, we are focusing this event on the edge. That refers to the edges of gaming that promise to expand the overall reach of games as it continues to rise from subculture to mass culture.

We have the Tetris Titans, president Maya Rogers, chairman Henk Rogers and Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov – to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Tetris and talk about the Tetris movie. It’s great to have some living legends who have been immortalized in film among us.

That film was one of multiple shows this year on the Hollywood and games theme – like The Last of Us on HBO and The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Game films were a small and shlocky niche in the past and now they are the ambassadors taking gaming to a larger mass audience. That is one example of how an edge idea can expand the overall audience once it gets traction. And that comes from authenticity and an understanding games and gamers.

We are covering topics like the practical metaverse, using technology to build community, the future of hardware, ambitious game startups, the cloud, Web3, alternative app