If you're planning to attend the Game Developers Conference later this month, organizers want to make sure you don't miss out on all the cutting-edge eSports-focused talks taking place at the show!
These sessions will be part of the GDC eSports Day on Tuesday, February 28th, a day-long series of panels and presentations focused on cultivating a competitive game's eSports ecosystem to attract and support professional players, teams, journalists, and grassroots player organizations.
For example, come check out the opening session on "Building eSports: Twitch, 'Rocket League', and 'H1Z1: King of the Kill'" to see two very important 30-minute talks: first, Twitch VP of eSports Nick Allen walks through Twitch's unique role in identifying the potential of Rocket League, helping build its grassroots eSports scene from the ground up, and nurturing it into a sustainable competitive ecosystem.
Next, Chris Wynn of Daybreak will explain the key factors that the H1Z1: King of the Kill team focused on early in the dev cycle to target the eSports market, simple game concept, emergent experiences for players and viewers, and building the community into the game's core, and go through the Daybreak team's hits and misses in the development and live management of an eSport.
Plus, in his talk on how "We Failed at Publishing Competitive Games So You Don't Have To" Iron Galaxy chief Dave Lang will speak to how the studio attempted to take advantage of an emerging market by forming a "competitive games" publishing label, and while their efforts largely failed, they learned a lot in the process. Lang plans to dig into Iron Galaxy's core takeaways from these failings by going over what they learned about the eSports market, sharing what they learned about marketing games to a competitive crowd, and even what to look for in the games you want to put out.
And in his eSports Day talk on "Arcade to eSports: How Your Competitive Game Influences Player Culture and Values," Evolution Championship Series (EVO) founder Tom Cannon will examine how the format of the arcade influenced the competitive culture of fighting game players, and why this culture endures today.
Using fighting games and Evo as a case-study, this talk will examine how the form of the public arcade machine shaped the player culture of the fighting game community. Attendees will learn how the rules and format of an eSport can influence what players value from their sport and from each other. Don't miss it!
For more details on this and other talks taking place at GDC 2017, head over to the conference Session Scheduler. For more information on GDC 2017, visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.
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