#devcom #respawn #gamescom #evoke20 are a wrap!

#devcom2017, #rsp17 and #gamescom2017 are a wrap. Wow, what an intensive but also very successful week!

THANK YOU, dear speakers, sponsors, program & strategic board members, brand owners, international partners, event partners, media partners, volunteers, visitors, supporters and friends: THANK YOU bigtime for your support and trust in this first edition of devcom (including Respawn): This wouldn´t have been possible without all of you! Many of you have been going the extra mile with us on getting this long week right! All of your support and work is not taken for granted, as we know how much work is involved in getting the speeches right, the boothes ready, the stages complete and the stories told, not limited to!

This has been an amazing week. As always a first-timer is not only a walk on roses, but a fair amount of work. Looking back to February -when our companies leadership team had successfully secured the project- the team running the shows were not only in charge to kick-off devcom while continuing the 5th edition of RESPAWN – Gathering of Game Developers in expected quality and community- but we had to get this off the ground while organising our usually biggest show of the year (QUO VADIS – Game Developers Conference during International Games Week Berlin) in April. This was kind a ride, as you can probably imagine. Nevertheless, no other option than: challenge accepted…

Fast forward to today: WE MADE IT! Given time, resources -and a fixed concept to mostly execute on- all of us can be really proud of what we achieved, since all of us together made devcom, Respawn and gamescom an amazing and lasting experience!
There is a reason it worked and that is a powerful, never tiring team: Starting with the core program team a huge THANK YOU goes out to the ever energised Martine Schumacher (Speaker Manager & Program Assistant), the ever cool Jay Zhao (Assistant International Partnerships and Program Support), and the ever target-oriented André Bernhardt (External Program Coordinator, Summit Master and Indie-Expo-Co-Host). Not only regarding keynotes we were supported from Singapore by Frank Sliwka (as Frank was not only as Project Lead of devcom, but also as Co-Program Lead, especially taking care for the contact to the advisory board and maintaining all concept and business-decisions on devcom together with Stephan Reichart)! So thanks to all of you!

Then my biggest THANK YOU goes from the deepest of my heart to all of my colleagues at Aruba travelling many roads of Khazad-dûm together: not all of us worked on the same projects, but all of you definitely rock (!): Lena Alter (Project Management/Project Lead), Cristina Lamyon (Comms / PR), Christian Herfurth (Sales), Jessica Hackenbroch (PM Assistant), Lizzy Neubert (Event Management), Bilge Balci (Accounting), Veronika Maucher (Social Media), Tristan Schulze (Event Management), Viola Tensil (Comms), Andreas Steinicke (Event Support), Kristin Janulik (DEP Jury Coordination) and of course, our ever positively attuned Stephan Reichart (Managing Director / Social Media Enthusiast). THANK YOU also for the huge support to our external forces of Carsten Hoppe (Operations), Sören Hannusch (Tech), Gunnar Lott (PR), Simon Fistrich (Video Unit Computec) and the amazing volunteer manageress Jennifer Killham (huge shoutout to the Super Jacksons and all of our volunteers)! Thank you for all of your support, in standing together and making the impossible possible!!!

Also I´d like to thank my peer group of conference organisers for the content partnerships at devcom and everybody who helped us on the program: THANK YOU bigtime: Jakub Marszałkowski and Hanna Marszałkowska at Game Industry Conference, Jacob Riis, Teddy Florea and Erik Robertson at Nordic Game Conference, Damir Đurović and Pavol Buday at Reboot Develop conference, Antonio Pasalic and David Song at Global Mobile Game Confederation [GMGC] and Rémi-Jacques Nadeau for the collaboration on Canadian speakers! Next in line a big thank you goes to Christopher Kassulke and Jiri Kupiainen for major support on the mobile and influencer summits, to all speakers on the main conference days but especially to the speakers in the tutorials, summits and masterclasses and our amazing program advisory board which selected many of the presented talks!

The INDIE PRIZE prize of the RESPAWN Indie Game Expo, powered by Amazon goes to Pawel Gajda / Wastelands – thanks to Yuliya Moshkaryova for the co-op again!

Last but not least we´d sure love to hear what you think: we received already a ton of personal feedback in all forms and shapes and will send out also an survey next week. Please reach out to any of us also personally, since we will collect all of this for future iterations on devcom and RESPAWN – Gathering of Game Developers, to counsel internally with the leadership team of Frank Sliwka, Hans Ippisch and Stephan Reichart, but of course the team will be also iterating on future editions quickly with the brand owners at BIU (last but definitely not least a huge thank you for the trust in us goes out to especially Felix Falk (Managing Director of BIU) and Lars Vormann (Head of gamescom) – thank you both bigtime), and also with KoelnMesse and the gamescom advisory board very soon! So all feedback appreciated.

TLDR: Thank you for all the support we received, this worked only because of all of you. THANK YOU everybody – see and read you soon!