GamesBeat Next – the future of gaming
Wagner James Au, author of Making a Metaverse That Matters: From Snow Crash & Second Life to a Virtual World Worth Fighting For, will be moderating a panel on Practical Steps to Making the Metaverse interviewing Raph Koster, CEO and founder of Playable Worlds, Inc., and Cory Ondrejka, co-founder and former CTO of Linden Lab, makers of Second Life. The Metaverse may have suffered from too much vision and not enough substance. At this session, we’ve got industry visionaries who have been working on metaverse ideas for decades. But instead of giving us some far-off vision, they’re going to talk about what’s doable now, and offer practical ideas that won’t take forever to build when it comes to bringing digital realms for all of us.
Eric Goldberg, President and co-founder of Playable Worlds, will be moderating a panel: Corporate VCs take on games: The Enterprise Strikes Back. In the bleak midwinter of the 2022-2023 downturn of venture funding for games, a significant new set of players are emerging, again diversifying the sources from which a game start-up can raise money. Unlike the crypto game funds that largely came and went, CVCs are longer-term investors; usually the progeny of a company in the games business; and increasingly operate semi-independently of the companies that spawned them. Come hear several of the more prolific investors describe how this maturation of games VC can support a maturation of game start-ups. Panelists include Joseph Tou, Managing Director/US at Sony Ventures, Andrew Sheppard, Partner at Transcend Fund, and Jake Perlman-Garr, Global Head of Corporate Development at Riot Games.
The event runs October 23-24, 2023, in San Francisco and tickets are available at https://gamesbeatnext.com/.