🇱🇹 Summit IX – Attendees & Agenda

This is the first of the 3 newsletter issues that are scheduled to go out before the conference starts on September 3. Today we'll cover attendee stats & agenda; the next issue will introduce the menu and explain the Summit's Social Game; the third issue will have the map of the venues, a more-or-less reliable weather forecast, and a list of actionable tasks.

This Year's Cover Art

This year's cover art for the Summit is created by 🇨🇦 Bandit Bandit Studio. You will find it on attendee bags, badges, conference notebooks, Super Pass hoodies, Summit pins, and of course you will also see it in the venue space. In this LinkedIn post I explained the concept, and what/who inspired us to go for it.

Housekeeping

Before I share this year's attendee numbers, there's 3 issues that Alma wants me to bring to your attention:

1. ✈️/🏨 Please double check if your flight schedule matches the dates of your hotel reservation, just to make sure that you will be charged correctly.
2. 🚖 Pick-ups at the airport: we emailed everyone, but not everyone has responded so far. If you provided the arrival details – great 🤝, you are on the list for taxi/minibus. If not – you can still do it up to Sep 1. If we don't have your arrival details by then, we assume that you'll solve the issue on your own.
3. 👋 Drop-offs: no drop-offs this year (same as in 2023). Please arrange this individually via your hotel, or through BOLT/Uber, or other services.

My own 2 cents: the Vilnius airport is now undergoing a major construction, you will see a new terminal (great!) and also roadworks (surprise!). If you rely on 2023's orientation ("I'll just walk out and see you there?"), things are, really, not the same. I was there yesterday and drove around twice before figuring out how to pick up a friend.

Attendees 2024

Inshallah, we will see 343 attendees from 47 countries, representing over 200 studios and law firms – another record for the conference. Here's the breakdown by the country of residence (which in the case of in-house counsels doesn't mean much, since their focus would be global, but still...) –

A shot-out to a few attendees who come for the first time, adding their unique experience to our community:

• 🇧🇷 Rachel Lerner Amato is an expert in the cases that involve law enforcement and video games, a specialized topic that we hope to unpack in the future;
• 🇦🇪 Munir Suboh is a Dubai-based IP-focused lawyer, with great insight and broad knowledge of the sector in the MENA region;
• 🇦🇺 Cam Rogers is a veteran entertainment lawyer from Australia, with a particular focus on video games;
• 🇧🇪 Dr. Anselm Rodenhausen is a new colleague of Ann Becker at Video Games Europe, working on the policy issues and helping our industry get better.

All in all, 103 counsels will attend the event for the first time this year. You can spot them by the orange lanyard – and be sure to tell them about the time when Alexandre Rudoni brought an accordion player with him on stage (while Dr. Claas Oehler presented in a German soccer jersey that day...).

Here's the breakdown by attendee categories this year (this excludes the 12 attendees who qualified by progressing to the semifinals of Legal Challenge VII):

Even though the number of the in-house attendees remains the same, there's more studios represented this year – thanks to the second edition of Summit On Tour, which allowed the in-house legal teams to split their crew between the two events in 2024.

In 🇨🇾 Limassol, we saw close to a hundred of in-house counsels; and we expect to see a similar number at the 🇮🇹 Rome event next year. We kept On Tour's registration price at the same level (€800/€1.000), so that studios may send more counsels without stressing their budgets.

Now, let's talk about gender balance at this year's conference. This is the chart that I could use to say "great news, we have more women attending this year!!" –

However, here's a chart that shows how much work we, as an industry, still have to do to balance things out:

Yes, there's more women attending the conference in 2024, but at the same time the share of women went down from 36% to 34% this year.

Good news, though: there's already more balance on the in-house side, where hiring is more dynamic – as studios tend to grow faster.

In this sense, the in-house segment now is a preview of where the law firm segment will be in the future:

Hats off to every GC and law firm partner who continue to work on eliminating the gender bias, so that our industry's legal teams become more balanced!

Agenda 2024

As always, we've been juggling the topics in the air (and in the emails) until the very last moment. Don't blame me – blame Valve that demonstrated how during a Steam Dev Days conference, you could amend the second day's agenda based on the feedback from the first day (I came there thinking that agendas are cast in stone, and I left thinking that agendas are just a means to facilitate exchange of information within a given community).

Before we proceed further... a souvenir – the agenda from the very first Summit.

What can I say? I think we managed to upgrade our content just a little, since 2015. Also, "eSports" with a capital "S"? oh je...

Anyways, here's the snapshot of 2024 in terms of sessions/social time:

There's 4 headline presentations in the morning blocks and 8 panels in the afternoons, for a total of 12 sessions across the two days – with 53 speakers in total. The shortest session is 45 minutes, and the longest is 75.

A few changes:

• The breakfast now lasts 2 hours each day, providing more social time;
• On both days, the program starts at 10:00;
• Each session is now followed by a 15-minute coffee break (a concept that we successfully road-tested in Limassol);
• The lunches are 90 minutes each – but there's going to be a faster pipeline as we'll already have the starters on the tables by the time the lunch begins, bye-bye, buffet queues (another concept that we incorporate from the Limassol event);
• Finally, the seating in the audience is going to be arranged amphitheater style, no tables in the first 20 rows (but some will still be available in the back, for those who need to work on their emails) – as we have seen at the Cyprus event, this allows for much more efficiency, optimizing the use of space in the front.

And now, the program:

Headliners 2024 –

50 Ways to Get in Trouble:
Enforcement of Consumer Protection Law XC 2024

🇩🇪 Konni Ewald (co-lead)
🇩🇪 Leonie Schneider (co-lead)
🇱🇹 Katya Nemova
🇺🇸 Eric Weiss

Compliant Engagement of Minors 2024 XC

🇮🇪 Anna Morgan (lead)
🇪🇺 Dr. Anselm Rodenhausen
🇬🇧 Nic Murfett
🇺🇸 Shanna Pearce
🇸🇬 Timothy Ma
🇺🇸 Amy Lawrence

Online Safety XC 2024

🇬🇧 Paul Gardner (lead)
🇦🇺 Cam Rogers
🇪🇺 Ann Becker
🇨🇦 Ryan Black
🇬🇧 Isabel Davies
🇺🇸 Kayla Page

Legal Radar: USA

🇺🇸 Karin Pagnanelli (co-lead)
🇺🇸 Marc Mayer (co-lead)

Panels 2024 –

Regulatory Challenges to M&A in Games Industry XC 2024

🇰🇷 Brian Chung (lead)
🇬🇧 Mike Turner
🇿🇦 Pieter Koornhof
🇨🇾 George Mountis

The Three Laws of Robotics:
Actionable Insights re: Artificial Intelligence XC 2024

🇬🇧 Peter Lewin (lead)
🇺🇸 Jennifer Stanley
🇫🇷 Andrea Dufaure
🇩🇪 Dr. Gregor Schmid
🇬🇧 Xuyang Zhu

Staying Compliant in Mexico & South America XC 2024

🇧🇷 Vanessa Pareja Lerner (lead)
🇲🇽 Efraín Olmedo
🇨🇴 Jorge Bedoya C
🇨🇱 José Manuel Muñiz Herrera
🇦🇷 Cristian Elbert

Legal Radar: India

🇮🇳 Vikram Jeet Singh (lead)
🇮🇳 🇬🇧 Murtaza Somjee
🇮🇳 Surbhi Kejriwal
🇮🇳 Sneha Jain

The Architecture of Aggression:
Cyber Attacks

🇩🇪 Dr. Tobias Schelinski (lead)
🇩🇪 Dr. Christoph Ritzer
🇩🇪 Peter Fischer
🇵🇹 Ana Bastos

So Close, No Matter How Far:
Emulators & Unofficial Servers

🇫🇷 Alexandre Rudoni (lead)
🇵🇱 Artem Shchuiko
🇬🇧 Andy Macdonald
🇩🇪 Prof. Dr. Christian Rauda
🇰🇷 Brian Chung
🇺🇸 Joseph Schenck
🇩🇪 Sebastian Scholl
🇺🇸 Mark Humphrey

Countdown to Extinction:
Monetization XC 2024

🇺🇸 Kirk Soderquist (lead)
🇪🇺 Ann Becker
🇩🇪 Prof. Dr. Henner Hentsch
🇬🇧 Brian Chadwick
🇱🇹 Katya Nemova
🇬🇧 Isabel Davies

Risk Assessment in Content & Operations

🇮🇪 Boğaç Erozan (lead)
🇵🇱 Kinga Palińska
🇬🇧 Brian Chadwick
🇩🇪 Dr. Jan-Peter Ewert

The whole agenda is now online, here, with a bit of context on each session.

Finally, there's one more thing that's new this year –

game Workshop @ Summit 2024

Germany's game is, undoubtedly the largest – and, arguably, the most efficient – national association that we have in the international games industry (see how they turned the bottle of wine in the photo above sideways, to avoid possible endorsement implications?).

This year, just before the Reception Dinner, 🇩🇪 Prof. Dr. Henner Hentsch, 🇩🇪 Dr. Claas Oehler and 🇩🇪 Kai Bodensiek will host a workshop dedicated to the state of the German games industry in 2024: from the incentives available, to the data on the industry's footprint, and to the latest initiatives of the association.

The workshop starts at 14:00 on September 3, and runs through 15:30 at the restaurant of Hotel PACAI. If you would like to stop by for an update (and an authentic German beer), please fill the very short Rechtsanwälte-Workshop-Anmeldeformular here – and come to the venue!

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All the best – and until the next issue, where we'll talk about how caffè affogato is back on the menu, and which specific drinks corner will be manned by a crew that's fluent in Polish.

/S.