A symposium on New Business Models in the Digital Economy and Games for Science and Society with dissemination of research output from year one of the project. To be held at Cass Business School, City University, London with a keynote talk by Nicholas Lovell author of The Curve and founder of Gamesbrief.

Schedule: 

1:30-2:00 Arrival and Coffee

2:00-2:15 Welcome and Introduction by Professor Peter Cowling

2:15-3:00 NEMOG: Year One - Coverage of our research output from the project's first year

3:00-4:00 Keynote: How to make money when everything is going free?

The arrival of the Internet has driven the price of content ever downwards. It has also enabled one-to-one communications with freeloaders, customers and superfans on an unprecedented scale. The games industry has been at the forefront of this transition, embracing free and learning how to make more money by satisfying more people than ever before. When Call of Duty was knocked off the top of the “highest revenue games of 2013” by a free mobile game (Puzzles and Dragons), it become clear that the world had changed. Nicholas Lovell will show how those businesses who embrace digital and abandon the tyranny of the physical can find new audiences, earn the right to communicate with them again and again and enable the superfans to spend lots of money on things they really value.

Speaker Bio:

Nicholas Lovell helps people make money from games. He is the founder of GAMESbrief, a website about the business of games. He was the Design Consultant on Angry Birds Go, the first Angry Birds game to embrace the free-to-play model. His video game clients have included Square Enix, Sega, Supermassive Games, Makielabs, Firefly, Rebellion, nDreams and many more. He has written books on making money in the digital age (The Curve, Penguin, 2013), on game design (Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games and The F2P Toolbox) and the business of games (How to Publish a Game). He is a non-executive director of Spilt Milk Studios. Previously, Nicholas was an investment banker (Deutsche Bank, Lodestar Partners) and a web entrepreneur (ShopSmart, GameShadow).

 4:00-4:30 Coffee break

4:30-6:00 Panel on Business Models for Games with Social and Scientific Value

Panel Chair: Professor Feng Li, Cass Business School

Panel Members:

6:00-9:00 Evening Session led by Kam Star (Playgen) with finger food, drinks, networking and a series of short, informal presentations by local game entrepreneurs including:

London