Chair Opening Remarks

James Day

Director of Marketing and Community
Dovetail Games

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See how accomplished studio leaders are approaching publishing, marketing, and community engagement strategies to collectively define the player experience and ultimately influence long term retention. As topic specialists, the panellists will discuss the tried-and-true methods that keep their studios agile in an ever-evolving market such as:

• Strengthening player attraction by aligning brand and marketing with audience expectations.
• Implementing publishing strategies driven by player data and developer collaboration.
• Building lasting loyalty by engaging communities in real time and feeding insights back into development.

James Day

Director of Marketing and Community
Dovetail Games

See Bio

Speaker Session to Be Announced

During this engaging session with Michael Hooper, an industry veteran with experience as a Publishing and Creative Director, challenges the industry’s fixation on “AAA” labels and why they matter far more to developers than to players. He will explore how budget based classifications offer no meaningful signal of quality, ambition, or depth to audiences, and how this obsession can actively harm positioning. Using comparisons across games of vastly different budgets, Michael will show why players care about experience, not expense, and how focusing on what truly resonates leads to stronger live service outcomes. Get into:

• Reframing game positioning around player centredvalue rather than budget driven labels.
• Demonstrating how quality, ambition, and depth can be achieved at any scale.
• Shifting focus from industry terminology to the elements that genuinely matter to players.

Speaker Session to Be Announced

Anila Andrade, Head of Operations at Socialpoint, will explore how strong community foundations and effective player support shape healthier, more resilient game ecosystems. This session examines how her team navigates community operations, responds to player needs, and builds structures that keep players engaged, informed, and supported by:

• Overseeing compliance and regulatory operations.
• Leveraging market intelligence to drive community strategy.
• Keeping a close eye on ever evolving a variety of regulations, such as GDPR and age gate restrictions, to keep their players safe.

Supercell’s creator ecosystem is one of the largest and most influential in the world, with more than 100,000 active creators driving meaningful business impact while strengthening authentic relationships with players. In this session, Ryan Lighton, Head of Community at Supercell, will share real examples from their decade long creator journey—highlighting how the programme evolved, what they learned, and how creator partnerships became a core pillar of Supercell’s publishing strategy. Attendees will gain a rare inside look at how a creator programme can scale sustainably without losing its soul.

• Building long term creator relationships that feel authentic and mutually beneficial.
• Leveraging creator ecosystems to drive measurable business impact across multiple titles.
• Applying real lessons from Supercell’s decade of creator programme evolution to strengthen your own community strategy.

• Join in to hear experts expand upon how community data can inform strategic decisions based on gamer interests and lean into how leading studios are proving community value, beyond just revenue. Panellists will discuss best practices for enhancing player interactions, ensuring community satisfaction tracking and interpreting metrics by:
  • Identifying key community metrics that matter most for engagement.
  • Translating data insights into actionable improvements or additions to community strategies.
  • Refining community management approaches based on measurable outcomes.
  
  

James Day

Director of Marketing and Community
Dovetail Games

See Bio

Given her experience leading publishing, IP, and distribution strategy, Anna Mostyn Williams, the Senior Director of Business Development & Partnerships at Jagex, will lead an engaging roundtable discussion on the evolving landscape of game distribution and what it means for publishers today. Whether you’re using with D2C, physical, Cloud, or Indie distribution models, this conversation will encourage attendees to give into:

• Fostering third-party relationships and navigating pitfalls.
• Assessing region and pricing strategy.
• Managing global distribution teams.

Speaker Session to Be Announced

Showing quantifiable value from player experience and support efforts can be more of a challenge. Grzegorz Gierczyk, Head of Game Services at Ten Square Games, will use his expertise leading VIP/player experience, localisation, and player support teams to reveal how studios can achieve tangible ROI and hit key KPIs through a robust, player centric D2C strategy. He will demonstrate why D2C is far more than a distribution channel and can shape the overall experience and directly influence commercial outcomes. Using data backed industry insights and concrete examples, Grzegorz will delve into:

• An example outlining what current D2C regulation means for other studios and what to consider.
• Demonstrating how localisation, VIP care, and player support meaningfully influence D2C performance.
• Applying data driven insights to build a more cohesive, effective, and commercially sound D2C ecosystem.

Speaker Session to Be Announced 

• Marketing and publishing teams are under pressure as more games launch daily, audiences fragment, and smaller teams must stay agile while tracking fast‑moving trends. Maciej Jałowiec, a Principal Product Manager at Tencent Games, will showcase how Tencent is:
  • Leveraging LLMs to read and summarise data from traditional press, Steam news and Steam reviews, and other sources to present complete pictures of how games are launched in today’s market.
  • Assessing potential next steps regarding how they can use their tools and strategies to collate market learnings, anticipate trends, and build AI-powered drafts of go-to-market and post-launch LiveOps plans.
  • Using their proprietary solution, as shown in live demo.
  
  

This panel explores practical strategies for strengthening collaboration between publishing and development teams, addressing challenges shared by both AAA studios and indie creators. Panellists will discuss how to identify mutually beneficial touchpoints, align around shared goals, and use data driven insights to guide decision making throughout a project’s lifecycle, highlighting:

• Strengthening alignment by using player insights to create shared objectives across publishing and development teams.
• Improving workflow efficiency by establishing proactive communication habits that reduce last‑minute challenges.
• Enhancing cross‑team cohesion so that publishers understand a game’s true marketable features, and developers know what players are looking for in their games based on market research.

André Persson

Founder
Digiai.ACADEMY

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