THQ Executive To Keynote Game Outsourcing Summit

The CMP Game Group, producers of the Game Developers Conference, as well as Gamasutra.com, have announced that Shiraz Akmal, corporate vice president of Operations-Product Development for THQ, will deliver the keynote address at the recently announced conference entitled GDC Focus On: Game Outsourcing Summit, slated for August 14, 2006 at the Los Angeles Airport Marriott. In his role at THQ, Shiraz is responsible for streamlining and growing the company's global product development capabilities through outsourcing. Akmal's keynote, titled “Outsourcing: The Next Stage of Evolution in Game Development,” will explore the evolution of game development and discuss how the industry has shifted to converge on a distributed approach. He will also highlight the benefits of outsourcing and explain how globalization is helping to raise the bar leading to better games. "Outsourcing is a top of mind development tool for game producers and industry leaders, but given its relatively recent and sporadic use in game development, it presents a level of uncertainty to more traditional developers," said Jamil Moledina, executive director of the Game Developers Conference. "Shiraz's pioneering work managing leading publisher THQ's outsourcing makes him the ideal guide to show our attendees how to effectively and confidently integrate this tool into their own development processes." Additional highlights of the event, which will explore the benefits of outsourcing in a world of increasingly complex game development, include "Geography of Outsourcing" presented by Jonathan Hales, president, OutsourceReport; "When Does It Work, Where Does It Fail? A Postmortem" presented by Rajesh Rao, CEO, Dhruva Interactive; "How Does it Work, and How to Implement it?" presented by Ben Wibberley, VP North America, Babel Media; and "Just for the Big Boys?" presented by Paul Steed, creative director, Atari. Other scheduled presentations include "The 21st Century Art Director" presented by Justin Muir, art producer, Midway Home Entertainment; "Anatomy of an Outsourcing Deal" presented by Chris Lena, producer, Sony Online Entertainment and Joe Shoopack, art director, Sony Online Entertainment; and "Do-It-Yourself: Growing Your Own Outsourcing Group" presented by Lewis Peterson, CEO, 7 Studios. For more information on the event, registration and sponsorship opportunities, visit the official website.