Hamburg Games Conference 2022 Sets Course for New Markets

The conference will take place on March, 2-3. Participants can join from anywhere in the world via a custom-developed,  playable online conference platform. The first international experts who will contribute to the program with keynotes, talks, and discussion panels have been announced. This year there is a new conference track which is dedicated to the topic of 'Games Funding'  with news and best practices regarding Germany’s federal government games funding and regional funding offers of the federal states, such as the Games Lift Incubator and prototype funding in Hamburg. 

The conference has a new central element of the event’s concept: The virtual cruise ship, which serves as an interactive conference platform playable in the browser, with a call port at various international games hotspots. In line with the conference theme 'Moving Markets', users can explore different international markets and get to know the conference's partner companies and speakers from these markets.  

The first speakers for the Hamburg Games Conference 2022:  

• Joost van Dreunen is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at NYU Stern School of  Business in New York and is one of the most internationally recognized games industry researchers. In addition to teaching at New York University, he serves as an advisory board member for several games companies and start-ups and covers background topics from the games, tech, and entertainment industries in his weekly newsletter SuperJoost Playlist. In his conference talk, he will assess the current state of the blockchain gaming market - whose top companies are currently collectively valued at over $12 billion. He will highlight recent successes and failures, drivers and trends, as well as how industry players look at the developments and make an outlook into the future of this market. 
• Alex Nichiporchik is CEO of the US-based publisher and developer tinyBuild  Games. In his conference presentation, he will recap the development of the 'Hello Neighbor' franchise: A journey from a small 7-person studio with a failing crowdfunding campaign to a successful multimedia franchise that now has a  team of over 100 people across multiple studios working on the series,  including five games, merchandise, books, and an animated series. 
• Kerstin Schütt is co-founder and CEO of the Berlin-based startup game studio Twisted Ramble, which puts socially marginalized and stigmatized topics at the center of its games - balancing serious subject matter and playful entertainment. In her presentation for the Hamburg Games Conference, Kerstin Schütt will share her experiences on how challenging it is to master this balance and how their game Duru, which addresses depression in a playful manner, finds its place in the market. Jakub Stokalski is game co-director for 11 bit studios game 'Frostpunk 2'. His aim is to create meaningful experiences in a language native to the medium of games. For the Hamburg Games Conference 2022, he will examine how the medium of video games has matured: games enable forms of storytelling that are not possible through movies or books. Games are an integral part of the (pop- ) culture and, with their inherent interactivity, can pull players into a dialogue and convey a thoughtful message in their own unique way. In his talk, Jakub  Stokalski will shed light on what this mature storytelling can do. 
• Jared Gerritzen, Head of Creative & Design at the Colorado-based development studio IllFonic, will address the question of how a studio can make the transition from working on well-known IPs to creating and marketing its own IP from scratch - from idea development, to design, to the finished product.
• Jana Grünewald is the project coordinator of the funding program "Kreativ Transfer" at the Dachverband Tanz Deutschland, through which games companies can receive funding for participation in international trade fairs and conferences as well as for international networking. In her presentation for the funding track of the Hamburg Games Conference 2022, she will present the Kreativ Transfer program in detail. 

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