Conference Day 1 – 8th September 2026

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.

Ed Badcock

Associate Director of Player Engagement
Zenimax Online Studios

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Sky Tunley-Stainton

Head of Programmes
Safe In Our World

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James Day

Director of Marketing and Community
Dovetail Games

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Players experience one game, one brand and one relationship. Behind that experience, however, sit Support, Trust & Safety, Community, Marketing, Security and Live Operations teams, each working with different systems, data and measures of success.

Through an interactive player journey, John Pompei and Jonathan Shroyer will demonstrate how these functions can each operate correctly yet collectively fail the player. They will then replay the same experience through a connected human and AI model, showing how shared intelligence across identity, behaviour, sentiment, intent, history and risk can enable faster, more consistent and more trusted decisions.

• Identifying where disconnected teams and systems create friction across the player journey
• Connecting player signals to create shared intelligence across publishing, marketing, community and operations
• Using AI to strengthen human decision-making rather than replacing specialist judgement
• Turning cross-functional player intelligence into stronger trust, retention and long-term relationships

Sponsored by: IQor

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John Pompei

VP Gaming Practice
iQor

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Jonathan Shroyer

SVP - Gaming, AI
iQor

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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.

Michael Hooper

Marketing Services Director
CCP Games

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Player attention is scattered, acquisition costs are rising, and loyalty is harder to hold onto than ever. The audiences that matter are no longer sitting on brand channels—they're forming around creators and communities.

Ada at Nordcurrent shares how her team identifies high-potential creators through social listening, nurtures them into community leaders, and builds scalable ecosystems that extend beyond the game. Through tailored incentives, creator-driven activations, and cross-platform content loops, these communities drive sustained engagement and can generate 2–3 million organic views in a single weekend.

• Identifying high-potential creators using social listening tools and engagement signals rather than vanity metrics

• Designing incentive systems that motivate creators through rewards, recognition, and long-term growth opportunities

• Building cross-platform content loops that connect players, creators, and social channels to sustain ongoing engagement

Ada Mockute Jaime

Chief Marketing Officer
Nordcurrent

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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 across titles like Brawl Stars, Clash Royale, Hay Day, Moco, Squad Busters, and Clash of Clans 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 by:

• 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.

Ryan Lighton

Head of Community
Supercell

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• 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.
  
  

Rafn Herlufsen

Player Experience and Community Director
CCP

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James Day

Director of Marketing and Community
Dovetail Games

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Liam Ashley

Director of Community, Social & Creators
Jagex

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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.

Grzegorz Gierczyk

Head of Game Services
Ten Square Games

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• 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.
  
  

Maciej Jałowiec

Principal Product Manager
Tencent

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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.

Rafn Herlufsen

Player Experience and Community Director
CCP

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Pierre Miazga

Marketing & Communication Director
Ubisoft

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Paulina Shepanic

Creative Marketing Director
triple espresso

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