Jade Raymond and Ken Moss of EA to speak about the future of games and tech at GamesBeat Summit

We’re getting a double-dose of Electronic Arts’ top leaders as our latest speakers for GamesBeat 2018, which will examine the future triple-A games and the technology required to make them and deliver them to consumers.

Jade Raymond, the senior vice president and group general manager at Electronic Arts, will speak with GamesBeat lead writer Dean Takahashi in a fireside chat about building triple-A game studios and her experience building long-lasting franchises such as Assassin’s Creed, Watch Dogs at Ubisoft and Star Wars: Battlefront for EA.

Ken Moss, the chief technology officer of EA, will speak in a separate fireside chat on “How will we power the games of the future?” Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors, will moderate the session with Moss.

We’ve switched venues to the secluded The Seminary at Strawberry in Mill Valley, California, north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Our dates and agenda are still the same at April 9 and April 10. Our conference is all about making games better and improving the business, and our speakers should give us a window into the future of game technologies.

You can get your tickets here at 30 percent off our rate using the code DEAN. We’ve also got a new $500 code for indie game developers, IndieVIP, on this link.

Above: Four human players play as heroes and take on four villains in Star Wars: Battlefront II’s Heroes vs. Villains multiplayer mode.

Image Credit: Electronic Arts/GamesBeat

Jade Raymond runs EA’s PopCap Vancouver and Motive Studios in Montréal. She founded Motive when she joined EA in 2015. Raymond is also responsible for the HD Star Wars portfolio across EA. She is best known for helping create the Assassin’s Creed and Watch Dogs franchises, and for founding Ubisoft’s Toronto studio, which developed blockbusters like Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist while under her direction.

Raymond has been passionate about games since her childhood in Montréal. She joined the industry as a programmer and has since been focused on bringing innovation and new mechanics and gameplay to action-adventure and online multiplayer games. The worlds she has helped create have inspired novels and major motion pictures. In addition to serving on AIAS’ board of directors, she currently sits on C2 Montréal’s board of directors.

As chief technology officer of EA, Moss leads the strategy and vision behind EA’s Digital Platform, Frostbite Engine and Information Technology organizations. In this role, he oversees mechanisms to ensure the most seamless experience for players, including Identity & Fraud, Security, Data, Games Services, Infrastructure, Mobile Platform and the Frostbite Engine to drive the future of the gameplay experience.

Prior to joining EA in 2014, Moss led the global marketplace technology, science and data organization at eBay where he ran the global end-to-end services platform that powers eBay across all devices. Before his time at eBay, Ken spent 20 years at Microsoft, where he founded and led the engineering and product teams on Search and held roles with MSN and Microsoft Excel.

Moss holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and is a lifelong gamer.

Above: Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors

Image Credit: Vorhaus Advisors

Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors, founded Frank N. Magid Associates’ internet practice in 1995 and gaming practice in 2001. He is a leading analyst and adviser in the gaming and digital spaces. He also leads Magid’s practice advising investment firms on media and technology assets.

Previous to Magid, Vorhaus worked in technology transfer/corporate fundraising at Caltech for seven years and then spent eight years working at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as University of California Santa Barbara, where he was assistant vice chancellor.

Vorhaus has been a columnist in Ad Age and is quoted in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Reuters, etc. regularly and has appeared on CNBC and Bloomberg numerous times. Mike is a Director of Perion. Mike is also a director of Maestro.io, a livecasting and Esports infrastructure company that is venture-funded.

Mike graduated from Wesleyan University in 1979 with a B.A. in Sociology/Psychology, cum laude. Mike served as a United States Capitol Page from 1973 to 1975. He later served as a part-time Advance Man for the Carter and Clinton White Houses. He has moderated numerous sessions in the past for GamesBeat events.

Our speakers fit within our theme of The Future of Games: Better games, better business. If you could see the future of games before it happens, that would give your business a competitive advantage. Our event will let the hottest game developers, publishers, and investors talk with their peers and business executives about their insights into the future of games.

GamesBeat Summit 2018 is the destination conference for networking, inspiration, and intelligent interaction. With the right people in the room to make great deals happen, our flagship industry event attracts the best game and tech developers and publishers, executives, marketers and venture capitalists. This event is intended for VP-level executives and the hottest game developers and publishers.

We’ll delve into the strategies of the future for gaming, and how to drive excitement, growth, and new startups. Our talks will feature augmented reality, virtual reality, esports, influencers, mobile games, core games, indies, new game technologies, and the connection between games, tech, and science fiction. We want to expose you to ideas like The Leisure Economy, where everyone in the future will be able to make a living playing games.

Games have changed as they’ve reached a billion people and $116 billion in yearly revenues, reaching the mainstream like they never have before. Can we still apply the lessons from the past to the current and future marketplace? And what type of innovations and companies will draw the blueprint of what’s to come? So much of the industry’s internal narrative has been about it being cutting-edge. How can we imagine a broader set of drivers other than technology that will shape the industry?

Our previously announced speakers include:

• show host and Spiketrap cofounder Adam Sessler
• science fiction writer Eliot Peper
• John Hanke, CEO of Niantic Labs
• Andrea Rene, game host
• Aaron Loeb, president of FoxNext Games Studios
• Philip Rosedale, CEO of High Fidelity
• Janina Gavankar, lead actress of Star Wars: Battlefront II
• congressional candidate Brianna Wu
• Tencent’s Dan Brody, vice president of business development at Tencent
• Rand Miller, co-creator of Myst and Riven
• John Underkoffler, CEO of Oblong Industries and science adviser for the influential sci-fi film Minority Report;
• Amit Kumar of Accel, a venture investor
• Jon “Neverdie” Jacobs, CEO of Neverdie Studios
• Josh Yguado, president and chief operating officer of Jam City
• Matt McCloskey, vice president of commerce at Twitch
• Joost van Dreunen, CEO of SuperData Research
• Nick Earl, CEO of Glu
• Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors
• Michael Metzger, Drake Star
• Chris Heatherly, head of NBCUniversal’s new game business
• Debbie Bestwick, CEO of Team17
• Perrin Kaplan, principal at Zebra Partners
• Stephanie Chan, writer at GamesBeat
• Bill Roper, chief creative officer at Improbable
• and Paul Bettner, CEO of Playful, the creator of the VR titles Lucky’s Tale

Advisory board

• Nicole Lazzaro, CEO of XEO Design
• Noah Falstein, chief game designer at Google
• James Zhang, CEO of Concept Art House
• Joost van Dreunen, CEO of SuperData Research
• Peter Levin, president of Lionsgate Interactive
• Jamil Moledina, Google Play
• Michael Metzger, senior vice president at Houlihan Lokey
• Mihir Shah, CEO of Immersv
• Gordon Bellamy, visiting scholar at USC
• Kate Edwards, former executive director at IGDA
• Tom Sanocki, CEO of Limitless
• Phil Sanderson, managing director at Ridge Ventures
• Perrin Kaplan, principal at Zebra Partners
• Sibel Sunar, CEO of Fortyseven Communications
• David Edery, CEO of Spry Fox
• Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors

Topics will include:

• Intersection of sci-fi, games, and tech
• Platforms: Where to place your bets? AR, VR, & more
• Creating a culture of inspiration and creativity
• Emerging markets for games
• Monetization: How to acquire and retain users
• Esports and building the community
• Deals: Follow the money
• Diversity and the expanding ecosystem
• Early Access as a business model
• How mods can launch new game genres
• What game engine should you use?

Sponsors include: Intel, Worldpay, Appodeal, Unreal Engine, Accel, Universal, Google, Streamlabs, Yomob, Altered Ventures, Mindmaze, Consul General of Canada, Pearl Abyss, Leyou, Jam City, Scalefast, Gfycat, AppOnboard and Mobcrush.