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Facebook's Gareth Davis to Keynote GDC 2010

Posted December 16, 2009 by James Brightman

Organizers for the 2010 Game Developers Conference today announced the first two keynotes that will kick off GDC week, starting March 9. Facebook’s platform manager Gareth Davis will deliver a keynote at the newly formed Social & Online Games Summit entitled, How Friends Change Everything. Davis will examine Facebook’s "massive disruption in who plays games as well as how games are discovered, distributed, designed and monetized. "

The other major keynote announced comes from Randy Smith, owner and game designer of Tiger Style. He'll be speaking at the Independent Games Summit, providing a presentation called Increasing Our Reach: Designing to Grab and Retain Players.  Tiger Style is known for creating the iPhone game, Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor, which was just recently named by Apple as their top-rated game of 2009.  

“We’re thrilled by the content already programmed for this year’s summits at GDC 2010 and there is so much more yet to come,” said Meggan Scavio, GDC event director. “Like last year, the summits are an outlet to explore the emerging segments of our industry and these keynotes highlight exactly that mission.” 

James Brightman has been covering the games industry since 2003 and has been an avid gamer ever since the days of Atari and Intellivision. He was previously the EIC of GameDaily Biz.