Review of Unite Europe conference in Amsterdam

Unite Europe felt like a perfectly orchestrated symphony that invoked a single thought at the end of day two: I want more of this.

My life has been all about boarding passes and industry events for four years now, so I’ve seen quite a bit. A good event is when a creator working on a problem accidentally finds another creator with a similar problem and they have a talk. People who do stuff, talk about what they’re working on now, share challenges, call for solutions and collaboration. This is my system of values, certainly. And in my value system, Unite Europe was a good event for those 1100 bright technical people who attended it in Amsterdam.

The crowd was split between young teams working on their indie masterpieces and mature development houses. I met devs from King to Wargaming, from a small studio in Serbija to even smaller team from Lithuania. In my book this is a healthy mix.

Sessions feedback is something very specific to one’s taste and experience. I loved the most technical ones by Unity employees, I loved postmortems and visionary ones, like the one by Charles Hinshaw of Framebunker and obviously I was happy to present myself.

Media. There was lots of media. We had a booth with our games, that enjoyed a good traffic. And we scheduled our media meeting there, especially that there was convenient seating around. Ever heard of games media going to a niche gamedev conference? Me neither, but most of the journalists I’ve talked to were aware of the tools and technologies industry, had technical questions to ask. I enjoyed that. After all, our gamedev industry is not only about sex and ethnical diversity topics, right? =]

Finally, you know, when your first thoughts and focus are on the quality of the crowd and sessions, means you did not notice everything else, like checking in, logistics, food, venue quality, available staff and all the other organizational polish. You would have noticed, had there been issues, correct? Seriously, everything was magnifficent: the conference that serves craft coffee and naked juice appeals directly to my heart (and stomach).

I've applied for a Unite conference in Boston suggesting to explain in-depth the seamless OTA updates topic, that I touched lightly at Unite Europe and that generated so much interest and post-session questions. Hope to see you all there!