GDC Europe sees 25% submission boost, adds Crytek, CD Projekt board members

Organizers of this August's GDC Europe, the leading and largest European game development conference, have announced a record number of talk submissions for the 2013 show, with more than 275 talks, up 25% on last year's total. GDC Europe continues to expands, covering vital trends in free to play, new game hardware and the very best design, business, programming and art talks - many of them debuting for the first time at the show. The submissions, from many of Europe and the world's leading companies, were evaluated over the past few weeks by the GDC Europe advisory board. This active board is filled with practitioners and influencers from Europe's top game firms. Using GDC's custom-created submission system, each talk was rated multiple times by the advisory board and ranked. Following this, a special in-person Advisory Board meeting took place in The Netherlands last week, talks were discussed and approved in person, and tens of submitted talks are in the process of being approved, with approvals and declines going out over the next couple of weeks. A host of invited lectures and even European-specific Classic Game Postmortems (following last year's GoldenEye 007 postmortem) are also being prepared, based on extensive Advisory Board comments. This year's Advisory Board retains some of the major pan-European additions from 2012, representing countries from Sweden (The Drowning lead Ben Cousins), Denmark (Mojang's Daniel Kaplan), and Finland (Remedy's Matias Myllyrinne) through a host of leading German developers, from Ubisoft Blue Byte's Christopher Schmitz through Bigpoint's Sven Liebich and EA Phenomic's Dirk Ringe. Britain (and his native France!) is represented by Rocksteady art director David Hego (Batman: Arkham City), and Limbo's Dino Patti and DICE's Lars Gustavsson are as just some of the full list of active board members. However, newly added for this year is Crytek's General Manager for Games, Nick Button-Brown, who's working on projects including Warface, Ryse and Homefront via the company's multiple studios, and CD Projekt Red's Bartlomiej Gawel, lead concept artist working on the acclaimed The Witcher series for the leading Polish developer, further rounding out the GDC Europe board in terms of European geography and studio influence. The first lectures for this year's event will appear on the GDC Europe website later this week. Registration is now open for the show, which takes place Monday through Wednesday, August 19th-21st at the Cologne Congress-Centrum Ost in Cologne, Germany - just ahead of (and co-located with) the massive 275,000 person Gamescom event. For all the latest news on GDC Europe, subscribe for updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS. Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Tech.