Only 10 days to go until this year’s Webgame conference, which will take place on June 21st in Paris at Gaité Lyrique.  The conference is an annual event and brings together leaders and innovators in web, mobile, social games to discuss the trends, challenges and opportunities in the sector.  This will be the third installation of the Webgame conference, which is organised each year by SNJV.  As announced last week, Rude Baguette is very excited to be a media partner for this year’s installment.

There are only a few spaces left, so if you’d like to attend register now!

This year’s conference is shaping up to be a interesting program that looks to be truly European.  There are various annual global ‘conferences of reference’ in the web, social, and mobile games sector including the Game Developers conferences, Gamescom, and the Casual Connect conferences.  Given the growth of and interest in the Webgames conference, we’re optimistic that this conference has the ability to eventually evolve to the same level of influence and notoriety.  This year’s event will host 400 attendees from throughout Europe and beyond.  You can view a detailed program of the day here.  SNJV have done a good job of rounding up a solid list of speakers, which includes both participants from France’s games sector, such as Ubisoft and Kobojo, as well as other global leaders in social and web gaming, such as Facebook, King.com, Sulake, and Bigpoint.
The conference will concentrate on various pertinent themes and subjects affecting the industry including monetization, multi-platform gaming, the increasingly important role of gamer analysis, and launching in the US.  As mentioned, amongst the speakers there will be several from France’s games sector who will offer their thoughts around these topics and, will hopefully, also offer new insights on France’s games sector. The conference is quite timely as there has been some very positive activity in France’s games sector in recent weeks including Bulkypix’s recent raising of funds from AXA Private Equity, the purchase of Prizee.com by Digital Virgo,  and a wide-range of new game launches (e.g. educational games from Chocolapps, upcoming launch of Ankama’s new PC game FLYN, etc). This news is encouraging to hear in a sector where funding is often a problem, inhibiting the development of game startups and/or smaller studios.  In our interview in April with the president of SNJV Nicolas Gaume, we discussed this challenge as well as the broader problem of the general lack of awareness that France continues to be a global leader in the games sector.  SNJV’s organization of this annual conference is an important effort in their objective to increase the noteriety of France’s games sector, both domestically and globally.
So, make sure to check out the Webgames conference if you can.  Another great point of the event is that it is only 150€, so a great value for a solid program.  We will, of course, be attending , so we’ll make sure to report back with a recap of the day and provide our thoughts on the main highlights and takeaways .