GamesBeat 2017 will take place at San Francisco’s beautiful Fort Mason on October 5 and October 6. And our next trio of speakers features both fresh faces and veterans from the video game industry.
Our speakers include Debbie Bestwick, CEO of award-winning veteran games developer and international games label, Team17. Bestwick started making games at age 17, and she cofounded Team17 in 1990 at the age of 20.
Team17 hosts theWorms franchise, Aven Colony, The Escapists, Genesis Alpha One, Overcooked, Yoku’s Island Express, Yooka-Laylee, and Sword Legacy: Omen. Bestwick has released 90 games with Team17 across home computers, console and mobile platforms.Since becoming CEO in 2010, she has focused on establishing Team17 as a sustainable business which achieves year-on-year profitability and growth. As a result, Team17 last year raised $20 million in funding last year. Team17’s Games Label helps support new startup’s and existing development studio’s create new IP and build for sustainability while retaining Independence. She has recently received a member of the British Empire award for services to the video games industry and was awarded Businesswoman of the Year in the 2016 Women in Games Awards.
Perrin Kaplan, principal at Zebra Partners and the former head of marketing at Nintendo. Kaplan is a veteran of the video game console wars. She joined Nintendo as corporate communications manager in 1992, and she became director of corporate affairs in 1996. She helped launch big portable and console hits such as the original Pokémon titles and Donkey Kong Country, and she helped get consoles such as the tremendously successful Nintendo Wii off the ground.
Kaplan rose to vice president of marketing and corporate affairs. She left Nintendo at the beginning of 2008.In 2009, Kaplan teamed up with former Nintendo colleagues Beth Llewelyn and Kelli Koenig Homer to form Zebra Partners, a marketing and PR firm for the video game industry. She has moderated several panels for us over the years, and she has worked with Fortune 100 companies including Intel, Qualcomm, Sony, Facebook, and Microsoft. Kaplan is a marketing strategist with a diverse background in consumer entertainment, politics, and journalism.
Image Credit: Stephanie Chan/GamesBeat
And our third new speaker is GamesBeat’s Stephanie Chan, our general assignment reporter in New York. Chan joined us earlier this year after writing about games as a freelancer while working at the media company Poncho, where she went from managing editor to head of operations and editorial. Her gaming bylines include Killscreen and Outermode, and she’s also a published sci-fi fiction author and reviews speculative fiction for Strange Horizons.
While at GamesBeat, Stephanie has focused on breaking…
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