Despite only launching a couple of years previously, the Annual Games beat Games and Facebook Gaming Summit is already on-track to become one of the most highly-anticipated events within the global gaming industry.
Hosted by VentureBeat, one of the leading industry resources for gaming sector executives and creators, the three-day event will bring together some of the most influential names in the business to discuss the future of online gaming and the opportunities we can expect to see in 2022 and beyond.
If you’re out of the loop, read on to find out everything you need to know about the upcoming summit.
The 2nd Annual Gamesbeat Games and Facebook Gaming Summit: Who, What, When, Where, Why
The 2nd annual summit will take place entirely digitally, and will be jointly hosted by the egg-heads at VentureBeat and the team behind Facebook Gaming. The summit will run for three days from January 25-27, 2022, and will include speeches, demonstrations, unveilings, and predictions from the great and good of the online gaming market.
Registration for the event is free and can be attended by any member of VentureBeat’s dedicated community, but you can expect updates to be shared widely across the media as the event unfolds.
Some of the main topics that will be covered during the summit have already been unveiled and include hot-button issues such as online gaming ethics, cloud gaming, app monetization, privacy changes, and the growth of so-called Triple-A mobile games (games published by mid-sized companies).
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Perhaps most strikingly, a full two days of the summit will be dominated almost entirely by discussions around Facebook’s recently-unveiled Metaverse and what this means for the future of gaming as a whole.
This is probably one of the most significant signs so far that the gaming community is taking the Metaverse seriously, and sees it as a genuine opportunity to push the boundaries of gaming as we currently see it.
As such, expect talks from the upper-crust of Facebook’s C-suite, as well as some of the biggest movers and shakers in the emerging space of blockchain gaming.
Facebook Gaming VP Rick Kelley will be speaking, as will Director of Global Gaming Peleg Israeli, who is also the director of Creative Shop @ Meta, the department that creates the art and design of the Metaverse.
CEOs and VPs from top-level gaming titans such as EA, Lotum, Jam City, Roblox, and the Entertainment Software Association will also be sharing their wisdom. All told, this could be an event for the history books, so register while you can!
Past Predictions
One central theme of the summit is the art of alchemy, with many of the VIP speakers using their time on stage to make predictions on what the future of gaming holds.
Some of the past predictions from the team behind the summit were largely spot on, with a few outliers that did not come to pass in 2021.
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VentureBeat accurately predicted that the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S would become smash-hit successes, as evidenced by their seriously impressive sales figures. They were also right that venture capital would massively expand its investment into gaming companies, with record-breaking levels of investment taking place last year.
In addition, their prediction that eSports would explode in popularity but that it would fail to produce the profits to match also seems to have turned out to be quite accurate, as most would agree that the revenues from eSports are not rising at the rates that its popularity would suggest.
On other predictions, such as the mainstreaming of VR and AR gaming and the wider implementation of smart-glass devices in gaming, turned out to be premature.
Predictions for 2022
For 2022, VentureBeat has also made some predictions, most of which align with the topics that will be discussed at the upcoming summit.
Whether these will actually be predicted at the summit remains to be seen, but it gives us an idea of what the industry thinks will define the coming year.
One of the interesting predictions covered concerns HTML5 games, which are growing in popularity across all corners.
VentureBeat predicts that the format will become much more popular in 2022, partly as a result of smaller game publishers wishing to escape the grip of giant platforms (such as Apple and Facebook) and strike out on their own.
If HTML5 games really do take off in the coming year, it could be a game-changer for the little guys.
Meanwhile, VentureBeat is also predicting, unsurprisingly, that the Metaverse will become a big deal. Specifically, they think that a “patchwork” Metaverse will arise that does not have much interoperability, but will be keenly taken up by devs nonetheless.
They list Roblox and Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5 as the main frontrunners in the race to provide playable games within the Metaverse before the year is out. Only time will tell.
So, will you be registering for the Games beat and Facebook Gaming Summit? If so, you’ll certainly have some juicy tidbits to choose from.