How can the games industry become more sustainable? Have we made any progress? What challenges face us, and how can we overcome them? This panel will share success stories and dive into actionable ideas for studios, their games, and players.

Live service stability is hard because: No matter how good your QA is, they'll never catch as many issues as millions of players using a wide variety of hardware setups. When the game crashes you're not going to get much information, just a callstack in most cases with very little context. Logs are your best friend in development but logging is not quite as easy in production for security and optimization reasons. You do have to balance your engineering efforts between addressing bugs/crashes and producing new content to keep players happy and make enough money to sustain the studio. 50% of your crashes can be caused by 1% of your bugs, but these tend to be sneaky edge cases that are very hard to reproduce. This means that when your QA finds an issue during testing, it's hard to know if it's a 'one-off' that happens one in a million or if it's closer to 1 in 10. If your game is procedural and systems driven like Helldivers 2, this makes it even harder because it's literally impossible to test every possible combination of weapons, stratagems, level-tiles, enemies, biomes, etc There are many tricks up our sleeves to solve or mitigate some of these issues. Learn in this fireside chat!

Angel investors, Venture Capital firms, debt financing, bootstrapping or government programs and anything in between. There are numerous options to fund a games company. Yet, we see many companies struggle with a sustainable funding plan to build a company spanning multiple years and projects. Does capital understand games? Do creative thinkers want to deal with “money people”? Is investment the right tool for funding games companies, and how can we negotiate funding terms for sustainable industry growth? During Games Ground medianet is organizing its first Investment Summit to bring together international investment experts with policy makers, entrepreneurs and non-endemic investors to discuss and find solutions for better games investment. On this panel we will explore options that can be generally applied to the industry, but also ideas for specific Berlin-centric solutions.

For over 20 years, Prof. Dr. Malte Behrmann has been deeply involved at the intersection of government and the gaming industry in Germany and Europe. He has actively accompanied – with consulting, teaching and research - the development of all funding programs that have emerged at Länder level, federal level and European level during this time. In his presentation, he will primarily discuss the current situation and how these funding programs are expected to evolve in the near future. His focus will be the perspective of an average small or medium sized game developer from Germany and more specifically from Berlin. How will the national game funds develop ? How about the most recent initiative, like the small program for founders and the possible introduction of a tax credit scheme ? What happens to local activities on Länder level like Medienboard or Game House? What are the perspectives of the European funding programs ?

TBC

In this talk, we’ll explore the development of Hate Hunters, a mobile game designed to help young people and youth workers tackle hate speech and extremism interactively. Set in a gritty, immersive virtual city, players work to clean up hate symbols and combating hate monsters, protecting their community. Created with input from young people, youth workers, researchers, and game developers the game merges action with awareness, promoting critical thinking, tolerance, and digital responsibility, making it a great tool in modern youth work.

In this candid discussion, industry veterans will share hard truths and valuable insights about the paths of publishing and self-publishing. The panel will explore the pros and cons of each route, uncovering secrets that publishers don’t usually reveal and the reasons why some developers choose to go independent. Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of which path aligns best with their studio's vision and goals.