GDC Next adds talks on Shroud of the Avatar, Wooga's 'Hit Filter'

As August comes to a close, the organizers of GDC Next 2014 featuring ADC are excited to announce two more excellent talks that will take place at this year's November conference: Portalarium executive producer Starr Long will explain how and why developers should go about crowdfunding their next project, and Wooga exec Sebastian Kriese will reveal how his company's proven "Hit Filter" publishing strategy works. GDC Next and ADC, which aim to highlight practical ways for developers to increase the creative and financial success of their projects, are taking place simultaneously on November 3rd-4th, 2014 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. As part of the show's cutting-edge Business & Marketing track, Wooga corporate development manager Sebastian Kriese will offer a viable strategy for quickly killing your darlings in a talk titled "Killing as Usual: Wooga's Hit Filter." Wooga's "Hit Filter" is an interesting development technique that drives teams to continuously review all projects and weed out the ones that don't live up to high expectations in terms of gameplay, retention or monetization. Kriese will explain why Wooga creates upwards of 40 game prototypes a year, then kills them at various stages of production in order to produce a handful of games with meaningful potential for success. Kriese also hopes to give producers and managers some ideas about how to climb to the top of the app stores and offer tips on communicating efficiently, failing fast and getting the most out of your "failures" to find a handful of perfect games. If you already have an idea for a perfect game and just need the money to make it happen, game industry veteran Starr Long will be giving a Production track talk on the topic of crowdsharing -- titled simply "Crowdsharing: Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing" -- that should offer you some useful learnings. Long has been heavily involved with the crowdfunding and crowdsourcing efforts surrounding Richard Garriott's Shroud of the Avatar, and he's coming to GDC Next to explain how the two practices can work together harmoniously to form a sustainable crowdsharing business model which empowers developers to make games for niche audiences without having to rely on a publisher. Long will run down Portalarium's successes and failures crowdsharing Shroud of the Avatar and provide developers with specific examples of how they can replicate this business model to build their own passion projects. Conference organizers look forward to announcing more talks in the months before this year's GDC Next featuring ADC, which takes place November 3rd-4th, 2014 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. For additional details about GDC Next and ADC or to register for the event, visit the conference homepage. Gamasutra, GDC and ADC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Tech.