GDC Mobile 2007 Announces Sessions, Speakers

The CMP Game Group (which also operates Gamasutra.com) has announced the list of speakers and sessions to be featured during next year's GDC Mobile 2007, a mobile games-focused adjunct to the Game Developers Conference. The two-day event will take place Monday, March 5 and Tuesday, March 6 at San Francisco's Moscone Convention Center North during the week of Game Developers Conference, and at the same location. GDC Mobile 2007 will bring together publishers, traditional platform game developers, handset manufacturers, aggregators, and operators to discuss the opportunities, challenges and viability in the space. Representatives from companies such as Sony Pictures Digital, Microsoft, I-Play, Digital Chocolate, GameEvil, Mofactor, G3 Studios, RealNetworks, Nvidia, ATI, Qualcomm, ARM Ltd., Texas Instruments, Ericcson, and Motorola will meet and present meet over the course of the event to discuss and debate the opportunities, challenges, viability of mobile entertainment. In total, the event is set to host more than 50 lectures, panels and roundtables covering the future of the medium. One particularly interesting sounding session on the event's schedule is a presentation by Sonic Network president Jennifer Hruska titled “Guitar Hero Mobile: A Blockbuster Comes to the Little Screen”, which will discuss the technological challenges faced in bringing Harmonix and Red Octane's popular console rhythm game to mobile platforms. Other topics expected to be covered include mobile postmortems; in-game advertising; cross-platform development; IMS standard and application development; the evolution of casual games; best practices on publishing; marketing, and porting content; and emerging and untapped markets. A full list of scheduled sessions can be found on the event's official website. "The objective for GDC Mobile, as it is for the entire GDC, is to provide a program designed primarily to empower individual game creators with hands-on development details and unveilings of bold breakthroughs," commented Game Developers Conference's executive director Jamil Moledina. "The GDC has grown to become the world's largest game industry-only event and GDC Mobile has quickly stamped its claim as the leading conference dedicated to mobile interactive entertainment development."