We’re grateful for a celebration of gaming at GamesBeat Next | The DeanBeat

20.10.2023 - 17:11 / venturebeat.com

I’m ready to see a lot of gaming people again and so GamesBeat Next is coming just in time for me. Things are different this time so I thought I’d fill you in.

On Monday (October 23), we’ll kick off with registration opening at 1 p.m. Pacific time. We’ll likely cut registration off at 11 a.m. on Monday as we’re close to being sold out. The event is taking place across October 23 and October 24 at Convene, 40 O’Farrell Street in San Francisco. (You can use this code, deangbn2325, for a 25% discount). The updated agenda is here.

Just about four weeks ago, we had about 29 attendees. We had a layoff at VentureBeat. We had a late start on this event. We had to change venues twice, and we switched the days we were doing the event. That’s a lot for our team to deal with in a short time, and a lot for attendees to deal with as well. But we’ve got an awesome team, led by our event director David Glass. At last check, we were closing in on 600 attendees. Thank you all so much for responding and signing up, even if you waited a little longer than normal. We’re so glad you have faith in our ability to pull off a decent event.

Our sponsors include Xsolla, Google Cloud, Forte, Amazon Games, nWay, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), Stardust, Bain, Scuti, The Sandbox, Modulate, Resolution Games, Bitwave and Level Infinite. We have community partners in the International Game Developers Association, the Blockchain Game Alliance and more. Some of these folks directly responded to our plea for help. Thank you.

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.

We’re so grateful as this event wouldn’t have happened without those sponsors. I’m thankful for our staff and our emcees Zsuzsa James of the Finnish consulate, Chris Melissinos of AWS, and David Hoppe of Gamma Law. Our awesome advisers helped me get 94 speakers, not counting five surprise guests who are the winners of our Game Changers 2023 game startup list. That project was orchestrated by Lightspeed in partnership with GamesBeat and selected by an all-star list of game industry judges.

The talks on Monday kick off at 1:30 p.m. with our lone virtual-only talk, a fireside chat between me and The Sandbox’s new chief content officer, Nicola Sebastiani. Then we’ll move into our in-person talks, which will be recorded but not livestreamed. Our first in-person chat will be a fireside between Joe Ferencz, CEO of Gamefam, and Andrew Willson, partner at Makers Fund, on our subject of user-generated content. They will kick off our event with the theme of Playing The Edge, or the notion that the edges of the