GDC Online Adds League Of Legends Postmortem, Facebook, CCP, Yahoo! Execs

Author: by Staff

GDC Online organizers have debuted new lectures for next month's Austin show, including a League Of Legends postmortem, secrets to long-lasting MMOs with CCP and Turbine, plus a monetization track with Playfish, Facebook, Adobe, and Yahoo! execs. The Austin, Texas based conference -- formerly known as GDC Austin -- is sharply focused on the development of online games, including free-to-play titles, social network games, and traditional MMOs, with a veteran online game industry advisory board evaluating and selecting the lectures. There are now more than 120 panels, lectures and tutorials currently scheduled for the October 5th-8th event. Following the confirmation of a keynote from Zynga chief game designer Brian Reynolds (FrontierVille), and track keynotes from Blizzard's Greg Canessa (on Battle.net), Playdom's Raph Koster (on social mechanics), and Bigpoint's Heiko Hubertz (on the rise of Europe in online gaming), organizers are revealing further new talks. The newly debuted lectures include the following newly announced and publicized highlights: - In 'League Of Legends Postmortem: One Year Later', Riot Games CEO Marc Merrill will look back at the last year of live operation on the popular multiplayer online battle-arena title, which is the most-nominated in the GDC Online Choice Awards taking place at the show. Merrill will discuss "lessons learned and some key factors for developing, launching and supporting a core game that is operated as a live service", including surprises and challenges the team faced, spanning strategies to optimize the live feedback loop, key roles and live team structure. - A panel called 'Strategies for Successfully Running MMOs from Launch and Beyond' will bring together notables from BioWare (Rich Vogel), Turbine (Jeffrey Steefel), EA Mythic (Jeff Hickman), Sony Online Entertainment (Andy Sites) and CCP (Nathan Richardsson), all people who are currently or have previously operated MMOs that have lasted for more than five years. As the description explains: "Launching MMOs is hard enough, much less keeping them viable after their first year. Acquisition and retention are the two most important levers that are used to keep an online game alive and viable. This panel will discuss strategies that help move these two levers." - The sponsored monetization track has also added lectures programmed by notable companies in the space like Playspan, Offerpal and SuperRewards. Detailed on Platinum Sponsor Playspan's own site is the full line-up for the afternoon of October 7th, including Playfish co-founder Sebastian De Halleux, Facebook's Deborah Liu, Adobe's Danielle Diebler, Yahoo!'s Kyle Laughlin, Nexon's Min Kim and more. These lectures join just-debuted talks with lessons from APB, Habbo and even Cow Clicker, with a full set of highlighted lectures including talks from KingsIsle, IMVU, Disney, Playdom, BioWare Austin, Hangout Industries, Broken Bulb Studios, CCP, Gaia Online, Playfish, InstantAction, Ubisoft and a host of other notable companies at the leading worldwide online game-specific conference. GDC Online is operated by the UBM TechWeb Game Network, as is this website, and will take place October 5-8, 2010 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas. To learn more about lectures across all tracks and summits for the event, for which registration is still open, please visit GDC Online's official website.