XDS (External Development Summit) is the first professionals-only video games industry event with a primary focus on external development for art, animation, and software engineering. The event, which takes place September 3 – 5, 2013 at the Vancouver Convention Centre, targets industry professionals, service providers, and technology providers.
Remote collaboration is a reality within today’s video game industry and there are currently no other international events offering an educational platform for strategic development in this area. XDS offers a much needed program that promotes cooperative advancement of external development practices for the games industry.
Keeping the summit’s four core values in mind (education, collaboration, leadership, and quality), XDS presents an exciting curriculum that includes international industry speakers and panelists. Tracks during the summit will include Art and Animation, Software Engineering, and Tools and Pipelines.
As the video game industry continues to mature, event co-host’s Autodesk, Hansoft, XDI, and Shotgun, see value in building this community to enable networking and to grow understanding of external development practices.
"The challenges involved with successful external development are growing as projects keep increasing in size and complexity. There is an opportunity for studios to find more successful ways to work with partners towards the execution of a single game vision. An event like XDS is essential for exposing and addressing these challenges. We are proud to have the opportunity to contribute to XDS 2013 and I look forward to sharing our experiences from our daily interactions with leading developers around the world who are using Hansoft for their external development," said Oliver Teckert, Senior Production Expert at Hansoft.
In a related discussion, Don Parker, Co-Founder and CEO of Shotgun Software, said "Now that distributed teams are a way of life for all our clients, we’re aggressively investing in building tools that make that process easier for both the creative and management teams." Parker continues by saying, "We are excited to be part of the launch of the XDS conference, building a conversation and community around those pain points, with the aim of sharing best practices across the industry and gathering input for our own next-gen pipeline tools. We’ve already been collaborating closely with game studios like EA and Riot, and look forward to broadening that conversation to the rest of the industry."
Summit attendees can look forward to being the first to participate in an internationally attended event focused purely on external development, while contributing and collaborating with other subject matter experts to mature and evolve the overall ecosystem of the games industry. And it’s a nice bonus that the event will take place in one of the most beautiful cities in the world!