Festival of Games 2011

UTRECHT – January 13th, 2011 - “Online gaming” got a whole new meaning with the introduction of cloud-based gaming in June last year. With games rendered in a cloud of servers on the Internet, they are truly playable anywhere. This is a ground-breaking shift in gaming and Tom DuBois, Executive Producer at OnLive is coming to the Festival of Games in the Netherlands on April 28-29, 2011 to share his experience. He will surely pull game developers in the cloud, while keeping their feet on the ground with sound business models.

Last June at the Festival of Games this technology was about to be launched, and since then four companies have entered the market. Cloud computing applied to video games unleashes totally new business models and new types of games never seen before. OnLive was the first company to enter this market, and now six months after initial release and experience with cloud games Tom is considered senior expert in this field.

Cloud-based gaming is not just about moving the game from the desktop to centralized servers as Tom DuBois explains: “As inherently online platforms, the cloud enables new social functionality and enhances a developer’s ability to build more direct relationships with consumers. Perhaps most importantly, a cloud-based platform can leverage investments in existing technology thus minimizing incremental development expense.”

Cloud game development allows a developer to start developing just the first couple of levels. As these become successful, it is so much easier to exchange the one binary in the cloud, than to migrate thousands of desktops with all different operation systems to a new version of the game, which consequently will require less customer support.

Seth van der Meer, chairman of the Festival of Games: “Last year the Festival of Games announced the theoretical potential of cloud gaming when it was about to be released, and six months later we see the first results. I can think of no better person then Tom Dubois, with the longest track record, to match the theoretical ideas with recent results and upcoming challenges and opportunities.”

At any rate, the games industry seems to have only scratched the surface of how this is affecting the way game distributors need to organize their supply chain and who will earn the revenue.

ABOUT TOM DUBOIS

Tom is Executive Producer at OnLive, the world’s first cloud gaming service, where he manages the teams responsible for games on the service, including publisher/dev relations, certification, and merchandising. At EA, he was lead producer for online services on all game platforms, globally, providing e-commerce, in-game play, and community middleware to EA’s game studios. Prior to that, he led online merchandising teams Trymedia.

The Festival of Games

The Festival of Games takes place on April 28-29, 2011, at the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht (the Netherlands). The 2010 event attracted over 2000 visitors, with 180 companies from 25 countries.

The Festival of Games is the most effective games industry event, that combines a conference, an international matchmaking event, called Pitch & Match, a business Expo for trade visitors, and the largest games industry Career Fair of Europe. The Conference in 2011 is powered by GamesIndustry.biz.

With the 2011 edition entitled "Games Anywhere", the Festival of Games will be all about how the eruption of games in every sector of the consumer market has interacted with the videogames business. The two-day Conference on April 28-29 will have a strong focus on convergence and transmedia, with the speakers Dan Winters, VP Developer Relations of Activision, Nicholas Francis, co-founder of Unity, Jurian van der Meer, Managing Director of Endemol Games and Scott Steinberg, CEO of Techsavvy Global recently announced.

The Festival of Games is organized by the NLGD Foundation and is made possible by the Dutch ministry of Economic Affairs, the province of Utrecht and the city of Utrecht.

See www.festivalofgames.org for more details.