With over 28 years of experience in games as a geographer and culturalization strategist, Kate Edwards has seen it all when it comes to geopolitical and cultural challenges that may be overlooked in game creation and can negatively impact a title’s release overseas. As more governments now extend their content policies beyond their borders, we’re seeing a sharp increase in content being rejected for not adhering to a single worldview. 

Arno graduated in Game Architecture and Design of the Breda University of Applied Sciences and the Intensive Drawing Program at the Florence Academy of Arts. He contributed to the development of Killzone Shadow Fall, Horizon Zero Dawn, and its DLC the Frozen Wilds. He is currently working on Horizon Forbidden West.

With over 20 years of working experience, Leon has ventured into almost all areas of the entertainment industry before landing his dream job at videogame powerhouse Ubisoft. Leon started his career at the early age of 16 working as a busboy in a small venue in the Dutch town of Hoorn. Having a passion for R&B and Hiphop music, he managed to convince the manager of the venue to allow him to produce his first R&B and Hiphop party, which sold out. This was the start of a series of successful “urban” events in the northern parts of Holland.

During these parties and DJ-ing throughout Holland, Leon got in touch with the Dutch Hiphop and R&B community. This resulted in the idea of creating a TV show aimed at this specific audience that seemingly was untapped at that time. After working on the idea with his older brother and self-proclaimed “Hiphop-head,” the idea was turned into a television show treatment and a few months later the treatment was sold to music channel The Box.

For the next 2.5 years The BOX was the platform for which Leon, his older brother and a group of friends produced the TV show “Urban LifeStyle”. So at age 21 and with a TV show in the pocket, Leon thought he had made it big. Alas this was a premature thought as after 3 seasons the TV adventure came to an end unexpectedly which resulted in a bankruptcy of his company Urban Entertainment. On top of this unfortunate turn of events, there were some more personal developments that also contributed to this more dark period in Leon’s life. That being said, the positive side of this was that he had now time to graduate from college (University of Amsterdam) mastering in Media Sciences.

With both a Doctorate as well as a master’s degree and a healthy dose of youthful arrogance Leon expected to land a job in the entertainment industry without any effort. While in the end he found his dream job at Ubisoft, it took around 3 years of applying for jobs to find this specific opportunity (which almost made him quit many times). Now, over 15 years later, Leon is Director of International Events and leads a team of 8 professionals who all together are responsible for producing the biggest events in the videogame industry. On top of that he started the Black Game Pros initiative aimed at generating and fostering more representation and diversity in the videogame industry.

A veteran entertainment executive across film, television, and games, Kruse oversees business development for Good Shepherd Entertainment, publisher behind the critically acclaimed JOHN WICK HEX, a strategy game by BAFTA award-winning game maker Mike Bithell. Formerly she oversaw Film and TV for Hivemind, the company behind Netflix’s The Witcher and Amazon’s The Expanse. Amanda co-founded Lionsgate’s games division in 2016, where she oversaw a robust slate of 40+ titles and integrations across genre’s including the narrative PC/Console game, POWER RANGERS: BATTLE FOR THE GRID, the survival horror game BLAIR WITCH. During her time at Lionsgate, she developed film adaptations of NARUTO, based on the wildly popular manga series, and BORDERLANDS, based on the hit video game franchise.

With 10 years’ experience, Martijn van Doorn is a highly respected executive and advisor in the game industry. Martijn has been with DDM for 10 years and as Business Development Director, is responsible for their European clients and initiatives. He oversees the European markets, for which he is responsible for the servicing of clients, new business development, cross-territory dealmaking and rolling out new services that are designed to provide even greater benefits to both the company and clients, such as DDM’s Investment Services, which aids both developers and investors with equity investment and M&A. Martijn has a background in game development, having started out as a producer at Green Hill but quickly moving into business development, where his real passion lies. It wasn’t long after that change when Green Hill was acquired by DDM and he was tasked with building up DDM’s European clientele, finding new business and advising clients on complicated business deals to advance their company’s strategies.

Maxim started his career in 2000 doing television and commercials as a generalist. From 2008 he worked as a generalist freelancer for a couple of years before moving to London in 2011 to work on movies at DNEG. He started as a modeler but quickly moved on to asset lead, build lead and finally build supervisor on various shows. In 2016 he made the move to ILM. Here he worked as model lead on shows like Ready Player One and Avengers: Infinity War. After spending a year as asset supervisor at MPC he moved back to Amsterdam in 2019. To fulfill his dream of working on games at Guerrilla. He uses his experience to help the Robot and weapon team to build assets for ‘Horizon Forbidden West’.

Per-Arne has been working in the game industry since early 2000. As founder of Sweden Game Arena and The Game Incubator he has supported numerous startups and studios in their pursuit for funding and investments. Since 2017 he is the CEO of Amplifier Game Invest.

Youri was a journalist and editor-in-chief for the Dutch version of the Official PlayStation Magazine for 13 years. He was also the editor-in-chief of the website PlayStationPure and wrote about music, movies and games for several publications like P Magazine, DVD Extra, TeVe-Blad and others. He also wrote and video edited for the TV show Gamepower on JIM TV. He traded in journalism for marketing and was a lead creative for several marketing agencies, where he worked for top clients like Netflix, Fox, Warner Bros., Ubisoft, PlayStation, Xbox and many more. In 2018 he started working at VAF as their first Head of the games department.

When he was 12 years old, Pepijn van Duijn aspired to be a game designer and has worked on it ever since. After the Creative Media & Game Technologies at Breda University of Applied Sciences, he’s worked on Space Engineers at KeenSWH before joining Vertigo Games, and generally gets all his satisfaction in life from making solid designs. His interests range from ancient Chinese poetry to Dyson Spheres, and reads a copious amount of books but says he somehow just becomes dumber instead of smarter?

Lucia de Visser is Managing Director and one of the six co-founders of the indie game studio Total Mayhem Games, best known for their hit series ‘We Were Here’. Before graduating, she created a small title called ‘We Were Here’, which was an overnight success on the gaming platform Steam. With a vastly increasing fanbase asking for more and her dream to set up her gaming studio, she convinced the top 5 of her fellow students to start a company and further develop the world of ‘We Were Here’. Five years and four games later, Total Mayhem Games is one of Europe’s fastest-growing indie studios, with recognition from all over the industry and the globe.

Sacha Blom is the Marketing & Recruitment Coordinator at Paladin Studios as a support to the People & Culture team. In 2021 she won the Dutch Game Award for inclusion for her graduation project on inclusive hiring practices. She is still actively working on diversity and inclusion within Paladin and the Dutch game industry as a whole.

With over 20 years of working experience, Leon has ventured into almost all areas of the entertainment industry before landing his dream job at videogame powerhouse Ubisoft. Leon started his career at the early age of 16 working as a busboy in a small venue in the Dutch town of Hoorn. Having a passion for R&B and Hiphop music, he managed to convince the manager of the venue to allow him to produce his first R&B and Hiphop party, which sold out. This was the start of a series of successful “urban” events in the northern parts of Holland.

During these parties and DJ-ing throughout Holland, Leon got in touch with the Dutch Hiphop and R&B community. This resulted in the idea of creating a TV show aimed at this specific audience that seemingly was untapped at that time. After working on the idea with his older brother and self-proclaimed “Hiphop-head,” the idea was turned into a television show treatment and a few months later the treatment was sold to music channel The Box.

For the next 2.5 years The BOX was the platform for which Leon, his older brother and a group of friends produced the TV show “Urban LifeStyle”. So at age 21 and with a TV show in the pocket, Leon thought he had made it big. Alas this was a premature thought as after 3 seasons the TV adventure came to an end unexpectedly which resulted in a bankruptcy of his company Urban Entertainment. On top of this unfortunate turn of events, there were some more personal developments that also contributed to this more dark period in Leon’s life. That being said, the positive side of this was that he had now time to graduate from college (University of Amsterdam) mastering in Media Sciences.

With both a Doctorate as well as a master’s degree and a healthy dose of youthful arrogance Leon expected to land a job in the entertainment industry without any effort. While in the end he found his dream job at Ubisoft, it took around 3 years of applying for jobs to find this specific opportunity (which almost made him quit many times). Now, over 15 years later, Leon is Director of International Events and leads a team of 8 professionals who all together are responsible for producing the biggest events in the videogame industry. On top of that he started the Black Game Pros initiative aimed at generating and fostering more representation and diversity in the videogame industry.