DevGAMM Moscow 2017 Postmortem

By May 26, 2017News
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DevGAMM Moscow 2017 has become something special for us. It was our first independent conference and it was just awesome. We raised the bar of quality and grew in number significantly.
Comfy Radisson Slavyanskaya Hotel gathered more than 1,800 professionals of gaming industry from all over the world. Each hall was full of attendees and each day was rich in events. Let’s go back in time and take a look at DevGAMM Moscow 2017 that was held on May 18-19.

Talks and content

The program included 83 talks and 120 speakers, participants of discussion panels, moderators and advisors worked on the content. We tried to cover more useful topics related to the process of game development. At the conference you were able to learn about narrative design and quests creation in Horizon: Zero Dawn and The Witcher 3, Azure cloud platform in Hitman, current state of RTS from Chris Taylor, future of neural networks form Sergey Orlovskiy and lots of other topics. During panels the experts discussed issues concerning the current state of indie development, gaming economy, games in messengers, game producing, recruitment and other useful topics.

Our attendees gave a positive feedback about game design track (thanks to Konstantin Sakhnov and Vladimir Kovtun & GDcuffs), marketing track (thanks to Alexandra Pestretsova), HR & Recruitment track (thanks to Tanja Evdokimenko). Our conference also had a specialized selection of talks about sound design (thanks to Ressa Schwarzwald), Unity (thanks to Valentin Simonov), Unreal Engine (thanks to Aleksey Savchenko).

The speakers Almir Listo, Henrique Olifiers, Rami Ismail and Mike Rose couldn’t come to DevGAMM because of visa problems or other business. Nevertheless, they expressed their sincere regrets and promised to meet you at our next events.

The main problem with talks at DevGAMM that you’ve mentioned was impossibility to visit all of them during 2 days! But we’re going to fix the situation. The videos of all talks will be available on our Youtube channel within 2 weeks.

DevGAMM Showcase

This year the DevGAMM conference had seen its biggest exhibition of gaming projects ever and it was divided into 3 parts: Mobile, Desktop, VR. During 2 days 121 games were showcased. Every booth got enough attention from our attendees. There was always a big crowd of people in the showcase area. And the fiery eyes of developers revealed the importance of your feedback, playtest and sincere interest to what they have been creating for such a long time.

The VR zone in particular organized with the help of Valve and ASUS companies, has become a novelty of our conference and taught us the important lesson of handling such showcase format.

Traditionally, our conference couldn’t be held without Speed Game Dating. It was divided into three streams by mobile and desktop platforms. Publishers and developers pointed out that such format is more useful and helps to meet relevant people easier. We’re going to develop this activity to make it more productive for attendees.

Game Lynch & DevGAMM Awards

DevGAMM conference always ends on a bright note because we want to fire you up with a positive energy, create the feeling of celebration and magic that we lack sometimes in our everyday life.

When we made the announcement about Game Lynch, we wrote that you should expect some madness on stage. But we never expected THAT to happen. This time judges and developers came face to face. It is really hard to explain everything that happened! Rap, low break dance, tattered T-shirt, naked men torsos… The video will be available soon on our Youtube channel but beware it is NSFW.

DevGAMM Awards ceremony met all the expectations. Guys from the gaming industry involved in the musical did a great job on the stage and made the show unforgettable. The hall atmosphere was full of celebration, creativity, inspiration and love of games.

Really cool projects gained a win. Here is the list of them:

Game Lynch Award

sponsored by tinyBuild

Breath Of Winter
Developed by ArmaturGames

Best Mobile Game

sponsored by Promorich

Kenshō
Developed by FIFTYTWO

Best Desktop Game

sponsored by Tobii

Kingewitch
Developed by Mad Head Games

Best VR Game

sponsored by MSI

Cargo Cult: Shoot’n’Loot VR
Developed by Panoramik Inc

Best Indie Game

sponsored by Pixonic

Garage
Developed by Zombie Dynamics

Excellence in Visual Art

sponsored by Amazon

Kenshō
Developed by FIFTYTWO

Excellence in Audio

sponsored by Amazon

Garage
Developed by Zombie Dynamics

Excellence in Narrative

sponsored by Amazon

Lost in Bardo
Developed by Backyard Team

Excellence in Game Design

sponsored by Amazon

Redeemer
Developed by Sobaka Studio

Grand Prize

sponsored by tinyBuild

Redeemer
Developed by Sobaka Studio

Parties

Where else can you meet people in the relaxed atmosphere, rather than the parties? This time TabTale company made the attendees happy with a comfy pre-party at the bar ‘Darling, I’ll call you later’ where everyone got their badges, drank some beer, greeted old friends and even made new ones.

The official party by Mail.ru Group & Unreal Engine took place in a really stylish club Gipsy situated in the center of Moscow. Energetic band The Hatters rocked the dancehall and helped the attendees to perfectly spend the time.

Bye-Bye Mingle on the second day of the conference was sponsored by tinyBuild for the first time. Beer and farewell hugs – what could be better after the unbelievable DevGAMM Awards ceremony. We’re really thankful to all of you, who came to us and shared the impressions of the conference. It is always nice to hear your warm words.

Networking and other activities

This time everyone could hold a meeting at a comfortable Business Lounge where the Pitch&Match zone was situated. A really nice addition was a tea lounge that gave an opportunity to our attendees to enjoy the taste of aromatic east beverages.

DevGAMM Quest participants also spent a quality time. Over 340 attendees have been completing the tasks by sponsors all day to get cool prizes that were actually in plenty. The winners got iPhone 7, PS 4 Pro, Nintendo Switch, gyroscooter, drone, quadcopter and lots of other prizes.

Among other activities we would like to point out the iOS One-to-One Game Review which is a really interesting format of meetings with experts that, according to the feedback, was well accepted by attendees. Moreover, the Unity Certification gave an opportunity to everyone to confirm their knowledge of the engine by taking a special exam during the conference.

Over 100 vacancies were posted on the Career Wall sponsored by Pixonic and over 340 potential candidates left their contacts.

Conference sponsors

Lots of activities at DevGAMM Moscow 2017 were organized by our sponsors at their booths. By tradition, Nekki company set up the Shadow Fight 3 tournament with katana as a prize. Rocket Jump helped not only to awaken everyone by giving away energy drinks but to keep the conference memories with a photobooth. Playrix lured a lot of people to their booth using cool gifts and the most unusual guest of our conference – Kiki robot. At Microsoft booth the attendees could relax and play Xbox games. If you dropped by the Wargaming booth you could have taken part in all-prize lottery. Company AdArt invited Triss from The Witcher 3 and Margaery Tyrell from Game of Thrones to entertain our attendees with the cosplay. Other companies raffled Apple Watch (Alconost), Xiaomi Mi Band 2 (Xelent), quadcopter (AdArt) and other prizes during the event.

We would like to thank Appodeal, Vizor, Unity, Nekki, Pixonic, Playrix, Unreal Engine, Microsoft, Renatus and other companies for supporting DevGAMM Moscow 2017.

DevGAMM’s new horizons

We’re really thankful to speakers, moderators, advisers, sponsors, volunteers, media, and all the attendees for visiting DevGAMM Moscow 2017. It’s you who make our event so special and give us energy to move on and organize more cool conferences.

Therefore we would like to invite you to visit our pilot DevGAMM Summit in Seattle that will take place on July 31 with 300 attendees. This event with series of talks for the whole day will be held within Casual Connect Seattle and devoted to all the aspects of game development for PC and consoles. You can learn more details on our website soon.

The next traditional DevGAMM conference will take place on November 16-17 in Minsk, Marriott Minsk hotel + Falcon Club. We don’t want to repeat the situation that happened last year when all tickets were sold out, therefore this time we can take in up to 2000 attendees. Expanded location, more highly-quality talks and a new format of showcase are waiting for you. Also now Belarus is visa free!

Leave us again to come back!