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Final Report on DevGAMM Online

On May 14-15, 2020, 81 in-parallel sessions were live-streamed at 6 DevGAMM stages and viewed by 1,303 attendees: developers, publishers, investors, and gamers. The event hosted a lot of gaming activities, 886 business meetings, and parties. It may sound like a standard gaming conference but in fact it was our first big event held remotely – DevGAMM Online. Let’s recall this experience.

Out first and deepest thanks go to the team of PINE platform, which hosted our event. It took these guys only two months to readjust their product in a way that would enable most of our offline activities. A sudden surge of viewers caused technical issues in the morning of the first conference day, but their team managed to fix them and maintain a decent performance throughout this first big online event ever hosted on PINE. 

We’re already working on session videos so that our attendees could access them as soon as possible. And a few months later, we’ll publish videos on our YouTube channel for everyone to watch. Don’t worry, we’ll let you know about it.

In total, over 100 speakers from large gaming companies and indie studios delivered their talks. Among them were Gearbox, Unity Technologies, EA DICE, Roblox, King, Kickstarter, Ubisoft, Remedy, Google, Snapchat, TikTok, Imperia Online, Firefly Studios, Those Awesome Guys, and lots of others.

The session tracks covered talent management, UX & UI, business and marketing, analytics, art, technology and development, including some other topics. Special thanks go to Vasiliy Sabirov from devtodev, Tanja Loktionova and Alina Mudraya from Values Value, Arvydas Brazdeikis from Game Insight, Valentin Simonov from Unity, Alexander Mezin and Alexandra Knysheva from Geek Picnic, who invested in content preparation and moderation of tracks with great attention to detail and love for the game development community.

For the first time, DevGAMM featured a Game Studies track where games were treated scientifically. Alexander Mezin and Alexandra Knysheva coordinated the sessions delivered by speakers from Lomonosov Moscow State University, Laboratory for Computer Games Research, Royal Danish School of Design, and other game industry specialists.

This time, we received 92 submissions for gaming activities that also went online along with the entire event.

We held a Game Design Review organized with the support of Svyatoslav Torik, the Product Vision Expert at Wargaming. Representatives of NX Studio, Hattori, and AppQuantum reviewed 6 projects in detail and gave tips on how to improve them.

We also held Speed Game Dating, a series of 3-minute meetings in two streams between 32 developers and 19 publishers. 

Also, a new virtual Public Pitch took place with 10 projects selected out of 35 submissions. All the teams did a great job of presenting their games and answering questions during a live stream. Our special thanks go to Akeem Denisov who assisted us in hosting the activity and helped guys to prepare their pitches.

Bringing the entire showcase to online format turned out to be a real challenge, so we partly replaced it with a new Streaming Showcase format: in two days, gaming bloggers showed 45 projects from our Games Hub. Live streams held by Ducat, Amiko-chan, and Mr Holodilnick were viewed and commented on Twitch, YouTube and PINE by more than 5,000 people.

This time, a Virtual Expo was reserved for our sponsors. There were branded booths, where they talked with attendees, held various workshops, watched pitches, told about their products, and received guests in a live stream. For example, Unity had an active interaction with their audience and held additional classes at their booth, while tinyBuild pitched ideas and even taught how to cook Russian meat dumplings. Too bad if you missed it!

DevGAMM is hard to imagine without parties, right? So we decided to go the extra mile and not only recreate them in an online format but offer you 5 night activities at once. In the Roblox world, there was an open island with dancing and partying, meanwhile, spatial.chat had 230 guests enjoying the talks and music at the dancefloor, yacht, and library. The fun lasted till after 2:00, in keeping with the best traditions of DevGAMM parties.

On the second day, spatial.chat hosted Girls & Games Online Networking, an online version of a traditional Women’s Lunch. 35 women working in the game industry took part. An emotional after-party DevGAMM Stories was the final networking piece: it gathered the regulars of our previous conferences for a nostalgic journey down memory lane to remember the highlights of the past years.

A virtual Career Wall has been placed on the website of our partner InGameJob. By the way, all the 142 vacancies at MYTONA, Wargaming, tinyBuild, Playrix, and other companies are still available here.

With the support of Unreal Engine, both conference days featured a LiveStream from our partners at Disgusting Men covering the main DevGAMM Online activities and asking the attendees additional questions. Over 30 developers joined the stream to showcase their latest releases and share future plans. LiveStream held on Twitch channel had more than 150,000 views during both days of the event.

The conference culminated in DevGAMM Awards ceremony. 70 judges picked winners in 9 nominations. Among those who announced the lucky ones were Edmund McMillen, Randy Pitchford, Rami Ismail, Chris Taylor, and Mike Bithell. Finally, the $10,000 prize money from tinyBuild was split between 8 projects, and the Grand Prize went over to Encased: A Sci-Fi Post-Apocalyptic RPG developed by Dark Crystal Games studio.

We would like to thank our amazing sponsors, who supported us within the unusual format: Unreal Engine, Wargaming, MyTona, tinyBuild, Vizor, Unity, Xsolla, Huawei AppGallery, myTracker, Nekki, Belka Games, Alconost, Plantago Capital, Strategic Music, devtodev, PINE, Values Value, inGameJob, NIKO Firm.

All in all, the first online conference did take place! We proved that nothing can stop gaming events, even a global pandemic. Now we’re gathering the attendees’ impressions using a special survey to make our next events better.

What happens next? We can’t answer for the entire world but we can definitely tell you about the future DevGAMM events. Stay tuned, you’ll find out soon.

Leave us Turn off again to come back 🙂

With love,
DevGAMM team

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