NLGD's Seth van der Meer

I think if I look at the countries close by - the UK is a bit different because you have quite an established industry which is also very focused on console games, or at least it was for the last 10-15 years - like Germany, Poland and Denmark, I think they're sort of facing the same challenges. They can relate to the same things that we are facing here as well.

I think it's quite new for Japanese or Korean or US companies. In some ways they're behind but of course in other ways they are very much ahead, but on topics like social networking and games, television and games, I think those are really European topics. It's more focused on development studios that are smaller with smaller budgets who are trying to make use of new ways of either making money or using new user groups that they can attach to games - women, elderly people, more casual types of gamers.

Yes, but education not so much. One thing the Netherlands has always had is a very good education system and there are many institutions that offer game design and programming courses. But as for tax breaks or governmental subsidies, I think it's closely related to the European agenda where we see, for instance, film, music and other related industries getting a lot of support financially.

I think that opening that up for game developers would be something that is a topic here in Holland, but tax breaks hasn't been much of an issue here. Not as strongly as I hear it from the UK or Canada. It's discussed but most Dutch developers are focused on where to find money in the market instead of finding a tax break.

It's always difficult to compare yourself to GDC but what I would like for them to get is a conference that is truly European so based on the agenda that European developers and publishers have - that will be something. The topics that are covered at our festival are really the topics that are relevant to them because they are in the same situation.

But for us it will also be that they found real business - developers finding publishers to sell their games and publishers finding interesting developers. Or that they learn how to make the most of their game or their company; that the knowledge that they found here really helped them make a decision on should we go for casual games or should we go for online consoles or iPhone and why are we doing it. And why choosing a platform can either help them to make more money or make better games.

No. Because that's why I think the agenda that we have fits especially the Dutch very well but also many European countries. I mean there are a couple of very good triple A developers making great games but they are a minor portion of our games industry. Most of our games industry was already, five years ago, very focused on casual games and mobile games so we have been working with different business models for five years already. A company like Spil Games, which is one of the largest casual games portals, originated in the Netherlands for instance.

I think this different perspective on how to make money in the games industry if you do not have a $20 million budget that's something that fits our industry very well, especially the Dutch who have always been very creative in trading and going to places all over the world. It's something that hasn't changed. What did change was the attention that we got five years ago for these kinds of topics from other countries. Now we see that the interest especially from the US and also Japan is raising so we have quite a lot of visitors from the US this year to see what we're up to.

That's always a difficult question. It also depends which perspective you have. I would say, of course, David Perry - it's great that he's speaking. But what I really like is that we've got a lot of local developers speaking from inside television and games - people that are doing great things.

We're also very proud of the sessions from Xsens, the motion capture company that originated in the Netherlands who did most of the work for Alice in Wonderland. It's something I am personally quite proud of because they made such a big contribution to such a movie.

I also really like the speech from Erik t' Sas - he has a speech about how his MMO company failed. Eight years ago they started with Spellborn which was supposed to be the next World of Warcraft. A lot of money went in there and it became a really very interesting game but it failed dramatically. The fact that he's willing to share why it failed I think is something that's very valuable. From my own background I know that learning from your failures is often better than learning from your successes. So it's something that I think will be a very good speech.