Connect with top gaming leaders in Los Angeles at GamesBeat Summit 2023 this May 22-23. Register here.
Our GamesBeat Summit 2023 conference on May 22-23 in Los Angeles (May 24 online) will feature six sessions on the future of Web3 games.
The in-person event will be accompanied by a third day of virtual content on May 24. You can use this code GBSDEANNEWS for a 40% discount on tickets.
Blockchain technology took the world by storm in 2021 with the rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and player ownership in games such as Axie Infinity. But hardcore gamers in the West resisted NFTs and big publishers backed away from plans to launch them.
Venture capitalists continued to pour money into blockchain game startups, but price collapses and scams like the FTX scandal led to more skepticism, and then the economic downturn started taking hold. But now the big hope behind blockchain games is back to basics: innovation and fun.
Event
GamesBeat Summit 2023
Join the GamesBeat community in Los Angeles this May 22-23. You’ll hear from the brightest minds within the gaming industry to share their updates on the latest developments.
Our first panel (11:30 a.m. Pacific time on May 22) to tackle this subject at GamesBeat Summit 2023 is “From niche to mainstream: The path to mass adoption of blockchain in gaming.” It features moderator Angela Dalton, CEO of Signum Growth Capital and speakers Canaan Linder, CEO of Stardust; Mark Otero, CEO of Azra Games; and Paul Bettner, CEO of Playful and Wildcard Alliance. They will tackle the challenges and opportunities facing the adoption of blockchain games, including issues of scalability, usability, simplicity and regulation.
Then I will moderate a session (12 p.m.) on what’s needed for the next successful Web3 game, with speakers including Peter Kieltyka – CEO of Horizon Blockchain Games; Urvit Goel, head of global games and platform business development at Polygon; and Serhat Maraşlıgil, head of operations at Boomland.
They will dive deeper into the subject with a lunch roundtable with the same speakers and the Horizon/Sequence team, including Horizon’s Corrina Chow, on how studios are solving the core challenges around Web3.
In the afternoon on May 22 (1:30 pm Room 2), we’ve got another panel tackling the subject of making fun games (with blockchain), including moderator Jason Nelson, West Coast editor of Decrypt Media; and panelists Benjamin Charbit, CEO of Life Beyond Studios; Susan Cummings, CEO of Petaverse/Tiny Rebel Games; and Jeffrey Butler, chief product officer Avalon.
We’ll take a breather and revisit the subject of blockchain gaming the next day with something complete different from a fireside chat (9:30 a.m. on May 23) that I will moderate with Brooks Brown, the cantankerous founder of Consortium9. That session is called, “Web3 isn’t the future of gaming. We need to Free Play.” Brown will unveil details around his company’s platform, NOR.
He’ll share Consortium9’s plan to “bring the excitement and fun back to gaming, and rejuvenate an industry that has forgotten the values that made it so successful.” They will explore how NOR will give gamers from any background, anywhere in the world, an opportunity to become their own “sports franchise” player, and how the economy of NOR fuels an entire ecosystem of play by empowering teamwork and competition between metagamers and gamers.
Our final session on blockchain games will feature Gabe Leydon, CEO of Limit Break, the maker of the DigiDaigaku Dragon series of digital collectibles. Leydon was one of the successful pioneers of free-to-play games on mobile with his previous company Machine Zone. Now, at Limit Break, Leydon has launched “free-to-own” NFTs, where his company gives away NFTs for players to keep or resell.
In a $6 million Super Bowl commercial, Limit Break gave away 10,000 DigiDaigaku Dragon NFTs in an instant, creating a memorable first in Super Bowl advertising history. Now we’ll see if Leydon can pull off another gaming success.
All of these entrepreneurs are happy to see the tough times burn off the scams from Web3 gaming, with the hope that what remains are the companies that will transform the industry and bring blockchain games to the mainstream.
While times are tough, I still think it’s worth it to gather at the industry’s center at the GamesBeat Summit and contemplate the big questions facing gaming. Our other themes include surviving in the downturn, generative AI, user-generated content, mental health, sustainability, mobile gaming, diversity and the metaverse. Over the years, we built GamesBeat Summit into THE event to meet the gaming thought leaders.
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