Looking Ahead: GDC Europe

I've always told people that we want to show the European perspective, create a European event, and have the opportunity to generate better connections with other regions. That's one point.

The other is that we want to create a showcase for Europe - it means we can present our best games, our best companies, our best speakers, our best services. To that end I've involved the most important organisations - the EGDF, the Nordic Game Program, the Eurogamer Network.

From this standpoint we have really good backing for everything, and I think it needs time for everybody to trust it. It's a US brand, but everybody will see when we publish our programme that we're creating something that's Europe-focused.

I think we have great support and I'm looking forward to seeing everyone who is important in the European games industry.

We have four session tracks - business, programming and so on. The main thing is that we want to give the world an overview of what's happening in Europe. That means we have two big keynotes - Remedy, on Xbox 360 development, will be showing a triple-A game, and another one, which is yet to be announced.

Then we have three track keynotes - one is from Crytek's Cevat Yerli, he'll be giving us an overview of the technical standards in Europe. Then we have Hilmar from CCP, who'll be explaining how to create a successful business story in Europe. And finally we've got a keynote from GameForge - he looks at the new development in browser- and client-games. That's a really big topic, especially in Europe.

That's a good question. We have a lot of topics, but I think digital distribution is one of the big points - we've got some talks about that.

What I think will be interesting is localisation - it's not really featured in other conferences, but there's no other continent that's really fragmented like Europe, so it's a huge topic and we want to bring it to the forefront.

There'll also be three great talks on the iPhone, from different perspectives - I think we have the most important iPhone developers around Europe on one panel, who'll be giving us their view on how to successfully develop games on that platform.

And we'll be looking at the future of the games industry - the change from the old economy to the new economy, what will happen and what the business opportunities are. That's a two-hour panel with business development executives from I think Microsoft, Capcom, Foundation 9, Konami, Paramount, Namco Bandai, Disney... that's another big issue. That's an amazing panel, all the big guys are there.