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.

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 more than 15 years experience, Maarten de Koning is a highly respected executive, entrepreneur and advisor in the game industry. As Partner and Executive Vice President, Maarten has been with DDM since 2013 when he merged his own agency into the company.

He oversees the European and Asian markets, for which he is responsible for the expansion and servicing of clients, new business development and laying the groundwork for 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.

With a background in investment management and game development, Maarten co-founded the Green Hill production house, which would subsequently be acquired by DDM. It was at Green Hill that Maarten established his principles for starting an agency, which were to provide business development, effective product management and consultation to video game developers. *Maarten began his career in the industry as a game producer and is a certified Scrum Product Owner and Scrum Master. He serves as an active board member and advisor for multiple startups, industry funds and game industry conferences. He is also still a shareholder in Mardelli, a family investment firm that invests and manages assets on a worldwide scale.

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.

Trevor Blom has led Vertigo Games’ technical teams since the company’s early days. In between development, he likes to exchange VR knowledge with peer developers and anyone with a pair of ears. Hot topics are the tricks we use to get our games’ features performing from high- to low-end machines.

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?