GDC Europe reminds on Summit submissions, reveals extended deadline

Organizers of the upcoming Games Developers Conference Europe have extended the submissions deadline by one week to April 23, and are currently seeking additional content for the Social Games and Smartphone & Tablet Games Summits. When GDC Europe returns to Cologne, Germany on August 13-15, these Summits will once again showcase the insight held by the best and brightest developers in the social and mobile spaces. Show organizers hope to make these Summits better than ever, and are especially looking for 25 and 50 minute talks from European and global developers in these fields. Last year's Social & Smartphone/Tablet Summits at GDC Europe were particularly well received, and featured lectures, panels, and roundtables from some of the most influential social and mobile developers in the business. Over in the Social Games Summit for example, Playfish studio director Jeferson Valadares (The Sims Social) gave an in-depth look at metric-driven design, outlining how to balance intuition and raw data. Elsewhere, Digital Chocolate's Rob Unsworth reflected on the development of his studio's popular social game Zombie Lane -- this lecture, like numerous others from the show, is available as a free streaming video on GDC Vault. In addition, the Smartphone & Tablet Games Summit featured notable talks from Fishlabs Entertainment's Marc Hehmeyer on bringing Galaxy on Fire 2 to Android, and Exozet Games' head of mobile development Matthias Hellmund on making mobile versions of popular board games like Settlers of Catan and Carcassone. GDC Europe also featured numerous keynotes covering the social and mobile realm, as Wooga CEO Jens Begemann offered his thoughts on the appeal of social gaming [free GDC Vault video], Ultima creator Richard Garriott charted the industry's social future, and Epic president Mike Capps revealed the origin of the Chair-developed mobile hit Infinity Blade. GDC Europe organizers plan to continue on from that notable lineup this year with even more exciting lectures, postmortems and roundtables. Those interested in submitting a proposal to this year's Social Games Summit or Smartphone & Tablet Games Summit can do so online via GDC Europe's official submissions page. Show organizers are also seeking proposals for the rest of GDC Europe, which includes the Independent Games Summit, as well as the robust Main Conference, which includes tracks on Business & Marketing, Game Design, Production, Programming, and Visual Arts. Once again, proposals for all of these Summits and tracks can be submitted via the designated page on the GDC Europe website. The event itself will take place August 13-15 at the Cologne Congress-Centrum Ost, just before the popular trade show gamescom. For more information on GDC Europe, check out the official GDC news page, or subscribe to updates via Twitter, Facebook, or RSS. All GDC events are owned and operated by Gamasutra parent company UBM TechWeb.