The right connection can change everything.
At XP Game Summit, connect with the people, companies, and insights that help you fund, publish, and grow your studio.
Two days. Endless potential.
June 12–13 | Toronto
Join hundreds of video game professionals and companies for two days of business defining insights, networking, and deal making.
XP Game Summit returns for 2025! Connect with global gaming professionals to forge connections, create business opportunities, share insights, and unlock the potential of video game Intellectual Property (IP).
With over 50 expert-led masterclasses, panels, and new workshops for 2025, XP Game Summit delivers two days of actionable insights and professional growth with a focus on gaming IP, designed for industry leaders, developers, investors, publishers, and service providers. The 2025 show features business-focused networking opportunities like the XP Indie Pitch, a dedicated showfloor for tools, services, and an indie showcase, planned matchmaking in the Business Lounge presented by National Bank, and exclusive experiences like the VIP Welcome Cocktail.
Opportunities are available to exhibit, partner, sponsor, and volunteer for XP25.
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Christian Fonnesbech, CEO & Head at IP Leverage
Title: Crafting Emotions In Games: the 5 pillars that make players feel
Description:
What makes a game into an emotional experience? This talk explores how to make players feel – from unforgettable characters and immersive worlds to authentic themes and narrative structure. Drawing on examples from beloved titles and practical development insights, this session is designed to help developers craft experiences that hook you in and stay with you, long after the credits roll.
Matthew Walach & Muddassir Mahmood, Co-Founders at Insert Coin
Description:
Celia Hodent, Freelance Game UX Strategist – UX/UI powerhouse & former UX Director at Epic Games
Title: Advancing UX Strategy & Ethics in the Game Industry
Description:
Game user experience (UX) is mostly approached very narrowly in the game industry, around a game’s UI. However, UX is better seen as a mindset impacting all aspects of game development. Dr. Celia Hodent, former director of UX at Epic Games will provide insights on how to approach UX as a strategy, so that it can benefit a project and a studio efficiently every step of the way. Having a UX mindset means improving players’ experience, which in turn benefits business goals. But it also means putting players first. This entails considering ethical challenges ranging from design (e.g. dark patterns) to business models (e.g. lootboxes) to avoid exploiting players’ time and money. The talk will conclude with guidelines for developing ethical games.
Shawn Fischtein, CEO of Gaggle
Title: We Created a Global Gaming IP And So Can You
Description:
How did a small team with no prior gaming experience and a modest budget of just $2 million create Goose Goose Duck, a global sensation that rocketed to the top of the all-time peak concurrent player charts on Steam? Join the head of Gaggle Studios as he shares the unlikely journey behind their breakout hit.
In this candid session, you’ll uncover essential tips, surprising tricks, and crucial lessons learned (often the hard way) on the path from idea to international acclaim. We’ll dive into the highs and lows, exploring why success in today’s lightning-fast gaming landscape is both thrilling and brutally challenging.
You’ll also get an inside look at the realities of the globalized game economy, including how Gaggle Studios captured and created tens of millions of new PC gamers in China, turning a local success into a global phenomenon which potentially shifted the gaming landscape forever. Get ready for a no-holds-barred exploration of indie ingenuity, global gaming trends, and actionable insights you can apply to your own gaming ambitions.
Chris Chancey, Founding Partner of Indie Asylum, President & CEO of ManaVoid Entertainment, and Chairman of the Board of Directors of La Guilde du jeu vidéo du Québec
Title: Indie Asylum: A case study for extreme collaboration between indies
Description:
Both Montreal and Quebec are internationally recognized as capitals of the video game development industry. In the last two decades, this industry generated important cultural and economic wealth. The emergence of small and medium studios as well as AAA companies settling in our province is the proof of a growing and healthy industry.
That being said, independent studios still face a variety of challenges such as funding, discoverability and a lack of business intelligence. To tackle these challenges we created a video game accelerator in 2017 that started with 3 studios and 30 people, and has now grown to 18 studios with over 200 developers. This talk will showcase how the Indie Asylum achieved this level of success through unseen levels of collaboration between indies.
Manon Salache, Product Marketing Manager at Game Rebellion
Title: Understanding your game market: The key insights you need to succeed
Description:
Learn how an in-depth market study can enhance your marketing strategy, boost user acquisition, and position your game for success before launch. This presentation covers key elements and demonstrates how to use these insights to craft effective strategies.
Key Takeaways:
A market study evaluates current market trends and assesses the performance of the game’s genre, analyzes the level of competition and determines how the game fits or differs from current trends.
Competitive analysis involves identifying major competitors and conducting a comparative analysis of their features and performance. This process includes studying competitors’ marketing strategies to understand their strengths and weaknesses.
This part involves analyzing demographic and psychographic data to create specific personas for targeted marketing. By understanding the audience’s preferences and behaviors, developers can tailor their marketing efforts to effectively reach and engage potential players.
Estimating the market size helps determine the potential player base and market growth potential, providing a realistic forecast of the game’s reach and success.
Positioning a game involves conducting a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) and identifying Unique Selling Propositions (USPs).
Rabia Dincer, Partnerships Manager at CrazyGames – web-based gaming expert
Rafael Morgan, VP Marketing & Partnerships at CrazyGames – web-based gaming expert
Title: Web Gaming Renaissance, How Publishers Are Rediscovering a Classic Path to Expand their Audience
Dr. Ewa Antczak, CEO of Felixa
Title: Moderate to Modify: Using AI and Psychology to Build Safer, Healthier Gaming Communities
Description:
“Online gaming should be competitive, engaging, and fun—but for too many players, toxicity is turning that experience into frustration.
From casual gamers to esports pros, harassment, hate speech, and online bullying have become all too common, driving players away, damaging mental health, and hurting gaming communities. So, can we do about it?
In this session we will explore the psychology behind toxic behavior and how AI-driven solutions can not only detect and prevent it but actively modify online interactions. This talk will provide real-world strategies to create safer, more welcoming digital spaces and address some of these questions.
🔹 Why do normal players turn toxic in online environments?
🔹 What makes gaming communities more vulnerable to negativity?
🔹 How can AI help modify behavior to create healthier online interactions?
🔹 What role can game developers and community leaders play in designing safer gaming ecosystems?
With over 20 years of experience in human behavior, psychology, and digital interactions, Dr. Ewa will share actionable solutions that help game studios, esports organizations, and platform administrators build thriving, positive gaming communities—without sacrificing competition or engagement.”
Alexei Zenin, Senior Software Developer at Uken Games
Title: Uken’s 10x Monitoring Win: Datadog Out, Open Source In
Description:
Come hear about our journey on replacing Datadog to monitor our systems at Uken Games and how we migrated to an open source Observability stack. We’ll be covering what monitoring capabilities we had with Datadog and explore our in-house Open-source based system which costs ~10x less and eliminates unpredictable vendor pricing. We’ll dive deep into how we replaced each component that we were using from Datadog, pragmatic cost cutting decisions, and technologies we used such as OpenTelemetry, Clickhouse, Prometheus & Grafana to ensure the highest quality gaming experience for our global playerbase.
Drekken Pownz, Founder at VersusAI
Title: Bots Don’t Sleep: AI QA for Games That Launch Smoother
Description:
What if your best playtester never missed a bug—and never needed sleep? From indie teams to AAA studios, developers are using AI bots to rethink playtesting—automating the grind, catching issues earlier, and freeing teams to focus on what matters most: building great games.
Dave Elton, Experienced Video Game Leader | Product, Production and Business Development
Title: A Whole New World(s) – Taking Game Technology and Game Theory Outside of the Video Game Space
Description:
Explore different applications of game engines, gaming technology and game design in the spaces ranging from theme parks and retail to car design and medicine, and even the design of future living spaces and cities.
As game makers look for new horizons to bring their expertise, we will look at industries and entertainment spaces that are using game technology and know-how in the creation of new experiences and living spaces. The game makers shall inherit the world (along with the meek).
Kristian Roberts, CEO at Nordicity
Title: The Audience Imperative: Building Live Time Value of Indie Game Companies
Description:
There are only endings to the story of any company: sale (the good ending) and death (the bad ending). In this session, Kristian Roberts (CEO, Nordicity) will take you through a mostly voluntary economic lesson to explore how indie studios can use the inherent value of audiences to build enterprise value in their companies – leading to the “good ending”. To do so, Kristian will discuss how community management, self-publishing, and long-term audience cultivation can help to build the kind of LTV buyer are looking for.
Garry Seto, Co-CEO, Head of Studio at Massive Damage
Title: Indie to AA: A Tale of Bold Ambition and Harsh Reality
Description:
From 2021 to 2024, our team at Massive Damage decided to take a giant leap – from making smaller indie titles to a self-published AA game – with Fera: The Sundered Tribes. It was a story of “firsts” as we switched from Unity to Unreal Engine 5, dove into multiplayer, tackled making our first 3rd-person open-world action game, and doubled our staff, all in one go. Spoiler alert: It didn’t go exactly as planned. But we learned a hell of a lot along the way. This talk pulls no punches about the hard lessons we learned by biting off more than we could chew. I’ll walk through how a dream project spiraled into unchecked scope creep, ballooning costs, and a scramble to publish before we were ready. We’ll talk about marketing misfires that set expectations sky-high and targeted the wrong audience, pricing errors that turned off potential early adopters, the challenges of self-publishing, how Early Access expectations have changed, and the funding nightmares that nearly shut us down – twice. I’ll also share how we tried to claw our way back once everything started to unravel. From revisiting our price point to overhauling onboarding, addressing core quality-of-life issues, and learning the power of transparency, we made every possible effort to salvage both the game and our studio’s reputation. For indie studios aiming to move up to AA or even in ambition, this honest, raw, behind the scenes post-mortem on Fera: The Sundered Tribes production and launch will show you how to recognize and avoid the pitfalls we stumbled into… and how to survive if you’ve already fallen in.
Jamie Hurcomb, Academic Advisor at Epic Games Education
Title: Epic Games Ecosystem & Transmedia Storytelling
Description:
The Epic Games Ecosystem tools open up a world of opportunity for cross-platform narrative storytelling (transmedia storytelling). In this session, we will explore how Unreal Engine and UEFN are being used as creative tools to craft vibrant, immersive narratives across multiple media & entertainment verticals (games, animation, film, interactive experiences) and look at existing case studies from popular game developers working in a transmedia approach with Epic tools.
TBA
Joshua Nilson
Title: Can Games Help Revive an Indigenous Language?
Description:
Métis developer Josh Nilson shares how his team used Roblox to create a culturally meaningful game that teaches Northern Michif, a language with fewer than 2,000 speakers. Learn how games can be a powerful tool for language revitalization, cultural connection, and community engagement. This talk explores co-creation with Metis communities, ethical game design, and why inclusive, accessible games can help preserve identity and bring players—Indigenous and non-Indigenous—into shared spaces of learning and play. Plus the game is very fun.
Julie Arseneault, Trademark Agent at Agence Mintbox Inc.
Title: Level Up Your IP Strategy
Description:
Intellectual property is a term that is used to describe many things in the video game industry, but rarely to describe what it actually is. This conference is tailored to the industry and designed to help everyone understand the main three types of IP : patents, industrial designs and trademarks. Once you understand what IP is, we will provide you with various nice-to-know tips and tricks to easily avoid common pitfalls when creating a new video game or content and what are the best practices to put in place right now.
Jack Cooney, Director at Nerd.
Title: Get Rich at a Reasonable Pace
Description:
Proven methods and insights that increase your chances on creating a commercially successful game.
Dr. Poling Bork, Founder, researcher, coach at Vocal
Title: Play To Speak: How Serious Games Can Help Children Find Their Voice
Description:
Serious games have been successfully used to treat a variety of conditions and support behaviour change. This presentation explores how these games may help (and have helped!) children with selective mutism and social anxiety develop speech. By integrating behavioural techniques such as shaping, fading, systematic desensitization, and positive reinforcement, serious games can support children to build their communication skills independently while having fun. Learn how gamifying behaviour therapy creates a safe and engaging space for children to find their voice, and at their own pace.
Marian Yalong
Title: Diversity in Roadmapping
Description:
Diversity isn’t just good for players, it builds stronger games and communities. This talk looks at how weaving representation into roadmaps can create real emotional connections, drive organic growth, and make players feel truly seen. Highlighting different backgrounds isn’t a checklist; it’s how games stay meaningful, memorable, and empowering for everyone who plays.
Speaker applications for XP Game Summit2025 are now closed, but would you like to share your expertise at one of our conferences?
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