Two days of cutting-edge industry knowledge

In only half a decade, Serbian indie scene grew tremendously and several extremely successful titles emerged. Dozens are in the making. The special formula consists of amazing teams, community support, a lot of effort and sound biz dev decisions, plus some luck. We'll talk with four people from local indie teams - two have already had global success (Demagog Studio, FoxyVoxel), and two are on the way (Shosha Games, Phobos). Join us for some first hand anecdotes and lessons.

This talk explores what ideas are, where do they come from and what is originality. It also aims to help audiences of all creative walks in the games industry to come up with more ideas and an insight into the creative process and inspiration.

From stumbling across borders illegally to yelling at foreign executives, learn from anecdotes across 60+ countries how to run a successful games business worldwide. Drawing from executive experiences at SEGA, Activision, Unity and others, gain insights and be entertained and inspired to be successful on a global scale.

Choosing games in the right genre that you have a chance to scale based on UA costs, payback periods etc. For a long time folks have been chasing long LTV games, but they are so capital intensive they are now impossible to get to scale as VC funding has dried up. Hyper casual is too short and can’t produce hit after hit. So a payback period of 3-9 months is a much better genre to build in as you have the chance to grow and scale and make a hit.

Building a culture of trust helps the team take risks that lead to huge impact. What would happen if we make the biggest sale ever, without caring about consequences? Can one employee decide to remove an in-game subscription without getting approval?

• what were the global (and local) trends that influenced HR most in 2022
• what was their infuence
• which of them are going to stay with us in 2023
• what does and does not work in HR practices during this turbulent time.

In this session Spike Laurie, Partner at Hiro Capital, will explain the merits of raising venture capital and how to position your studio for a successful fundraise.

How hard is it to create an outstanding Design team? What challenges will be waiting for a new Lead Designer or Creative director? Creative work is tough by definition, hardly predictable and quite risky. And creative management isn’t easier. With good will in heart and proper objectives in mind it takes a lot of effort and mistakes to take a team of good designers and turn it into a great one.

During the workshop, Aleksei and Mikhail will overview services and solutions portfolio by Amazon Web Services, focusing on real-life use cases and specific key metrics on every stage of a game’s lifecycle, from art creation, through prototyping, to scaling, to easy-to-setup analytics and intelligent tools. The workshop is aimed at non-technical audience, and will also cover some tools and services the bigger Amazon gives for user acquisition, retention and monetization. But the speakers will be happy to discuss technical aspects A to Z.

"Development hell and feature creep is something that happens to other developers, we're just a bit off on our estimates for the polish phase". It happens to all of us, and it's particularly devastating if we lack the experience and methods to work through it. In this talk, I'll be sharing my experience on getting games across the finish line.

"We ogranized our very own Steam Custom VR Sale for Action games and got an awesome results. We want to share our experience with other developers and motivate them participate in sales and organize their own."

While you're creating new features/projects, it's very important to try many ideas and not to waste time on unviable features, even if they seem brilliant in the gamedesigner's mind. Natalya will share tips of organizing the Sprint review process in our company: how to involve a team, how to organize unstructured reviews into tasks and complete them.

The session will focus on how one’s relation with the store is quite essential for the success of the product. We will discuss the process of submitting your updates for feature on various stores (will focus on main stores such as Google Play and AppStore, and additionally other platforms such as Amazon, Windows and others). Some details of what is requested from the store upon the confirmation of the feature will be shared. To support the given information, ZiMAD’s examples of featurings will be shown and some insights of positive and negative impacts.