Call for Speakers

LOGIN's goal is to continue to be the most informative technical conference in the industry. Now in our fourth year, we hope to achieve that goal with world-class speakers and information packed sessions, focusing entirely on developers and the challenges they face in our changing and expanding market.

LOGIN offers its speakers tremendous opportunities for exposure and recognition. Sessions will attract many technical professionals interested in learning from your expertise and experience. Speakers who are already well established can continue to build their reputation, sharing new expertise and strengthening their already popular presentations. LOGIN provides the following benefits to speakers:

• Complimentary registration to the conference, exhibition, keynotes, and exhibit events. Speakers are generally responsible for their own travel and hotel accommodations.
• Daily access to the exclusive Speaker/VIP Lounge.
• Speaker listing and company reference in the conference program and conference web site.

We hope that you will be able to participate in this event and look forward to your submission.

Speaker Submission Process

Submitting a speaking proposal for LOGIN is a multi-step process. First, you should read and understand the acceptable session formats at LOGIN, documented in the LOGIN Speaker Guidelines. Next, complete the speaker information form to provide biographical information. This only needs to be done once, even if you are submitting multiple session proposals. Finally, you should complete the session proposal form for each of your proposed sessions.

Submission Steps

Read the Speaker Guidelines
Complete the Speaker Information Form
Complete the Session Proposal Form

Top 5 tips for getting your proposal accepted at LOGIN

1. Submit a proposal on one of the many identified areas of interest. The advisory board has put a good deal of thought identifying areas that we feel are relevant to attendees. If your proposal is the only one for an area we are interested in, it will have priority over all the proposals outside our identified topic ideas.
2. Avoid any marketing slant in your proposals, particularly if you represent a service or technology vendor. LOGIN will host no sponsored or commercial sessions, and proposals which appear to be sales pitches in disguise will be rejected.
3. Focus on areas of your expertise. The audience of LOGIN consists of experienced industry leaders who want to hear from experts. Avoid areas where you aren't experienced or recognized as an expert. Give stories about your own experiences, rather than theoretical ideas.
4. Spend time writing a quality abstract. A poorly written or overly terse abstract indicates that you aren't willing to prepare in advance. The abstract is the most important part of your proposal and the basis on which it will be judged.
5. Submit your proposal well before the January 25 deadline. By the end of the call for speakers, we will have selected many of the sessions already and your proposal will be competing with every other proposal for a shrinking number of speaker slots.

Have a question not answered here?

Send an email to speak@loginconference.com and we'll try to help.

Areas of Interest

Following is a list of topic areas of interest for LOGIN 2010. Topic guidelines are not all-inclusive or restrictive. All original and innovative submissions will be considered.

Please note that these are not meant as session titles to be parroted back to us; we're looking for you to relate your unique and individual experiences that will preferably relate to these interest areas. We prefer sessions covering your actual experience with the topic in question. We will select “X worked like this and didn’t work like that” sessions over “I think X will work like this” sessions. We prefer war stories over speculation, even if those war stories are a few years old.

General

• The future of PC gaming
• The future of Console gaming
• Surviving economic downturns
• Virtual worlds after Second Life: What will future virtual worlds need to succeed?
• Ethical responsibilities of online game developers
• Streaming distribution (ex: OnLive) versus traditional hardware platforms
• How to acquire top talent
• Going Indie – making your own games
• Distributed development – dealing with virtual teams
• Develop-to-spec or Develop-to-date – Who has experiences with which?
• How features large and small go from ideas to implementation on different kinds of teams – Comparing and finding out what works for whom and why
• How your teams are organized – How do teams internally communicate
• Getting started from nothing – What’s worked, what’s not?

Design

• Design post mortems
• Successful downloadable content/content update strategies for player retention
• Virality without banality – how to leverage social graphs and still be principled
• Design traps – ideas for fun which have increased customer support costs
• Creating user interfaces a grandmother could love
• Creating user interfaces for feelings
• Cross-Platform or Transmedia?: The Right Game for the Right Place
  • Creating effective integrated cross-platform online games (PC and mobile, console and mobile, etc.)
• Going Casual – making simple, yet fun games
• Sharding game worlds
  • What are the consequences of choosing one type of sharding over another?
  • What is the impact of going shardless on community
• Families, guilds, and communities: how does game design best take advantage of implicit social structures?
• The Art and Design of Creating Facebook MMO Games (Ohai, Three Rings, etc)
• Unsolved problems in MMO game design
  • How to balance a game with a large level range so that it remains fun at every level
  • Grouping new and elder players together
  • Creating the impression of a massive world without travel being an obstacle to fun
  • Scaling content to arbitrary group sizes
  • Bringing players together with the feeling of a large community without killing your server
• Design/gameplay elements – things that worked, things that failed – how did you decide? What mistakes would you avoid next time?
• How to best use practical gameplay metrics to influence ongoing game design. (More than just: “Data and metrics are good. Use them.”)

Programming

• Programming post mortems
• Preventing cheating and item duplication while allowing offline play
• Architecture of an MMO
• MMO technology failures
• How to organize game data on teams at various scales (collections, flat files, tables, etc)
• Best practices for tools – both creating and using, and creative solutions therein
• Strategies for dealing with multiple branch live game development
• Experiences positive/negative with leveraging OSS
• Prioritizing multiple tracks of pre-launch development: external features, internal support, polish, performance, stabilization – Success/fail strategies?

Operations

• How to have enough server capacity at launch without breaking the bank or melting the servers
• Evolving the Back End: Trend spotting the next big things in support and operations

Business

• How to successfully publish your iPhone app
• Marketing Independent Games.
  • Panel would consist of one speaker from each: Marketing, PR, Social Media, and maybe one developer who has successfully marketed their indie game
• Which markets are the most overvalued and undervalued opportunities for online game companies?
• Competing with a boxed product-obsessed market
  • Developing games that can compete and satisfy gamers, overcoming the perception that online games don’t translate to the quality of boxed product (Possibly stacking online titles up against major boxed competitors)
• Converting your brands into social and casual games
• Product advertising importance and how
• Taking the Trial and Error out of Trial Programs in Your Online Game: Strategies for Converting Users into Accounts
• Data analytics – which metrics matter the most for your game (talk about different types of metrics – gameplay, interaction, financial – and approaches to use)

Monetization

• Post mortems: Transitioning to Free to Play
• Brief history of business models in online games – what to learn from the past
• How to structure your game and payments to keep bringing users back (basic thesis – every game uses a recurring model if done correctly, but communications, gameplay, and payments need to be optimized with this in mind)
• Controversy around Offer based Payments. Where do they go from here?
• How to Make a Hybrid Biz Model of FTP/Virtual Items and Subscriptions Work
• Best Practices for Fraud/Chargeback Management…Prevention + Remediation
• PayPal’s New Student Accounts – Meaningful for Online Gaming?
• How to take advantage of PayPal’s new innovations – student accounts & PayPal X API
• Balancing revenue streams – best practices to help analyze and optimize advertising, microtransactions and subscriptions
• Improving the quality of social gaming monetization
• In-game advertising and the user experience.
  • In-game advertising was the topic of the century a few years ago. Would be interesting to see what is the next trend, how users are effected, can there be a positve user experience, etc.
• Successful (and reproducible) steps in monetization of free to play games
• Monetizing kids’ social and online games.
  • Lessons learned and advancing strategies to generate revenues from this audience

Globalization

• Globalization post mortems
• Tackling International Launches/Territories
  • How to leverage an international license, considerations, steps and insights, dealing with payment methods, localizing outbound content, technology and cultural considerations, etc.
• What does a publisher, developer or vendor need to succeed in China?

Community

• Game communities (development, importance)
• Building communities for kids and teens. Much of where kids get their influence to try something new online is from other kids in the real world

Legal

• Labor issues in virtual worlds
• Privacy - its no longer voluntary
• Clearance isses for content - the reach of fair use
• Payment systems in virtual worlds; how to avoid becoming a bank
• The tax man - how far will government go to tax in game transactions
• How to pitch and still keep your secrets
• The disconnect between content owners and game developers; why don't they get it and what can you do about it
• Issues with in game advertising
• Legislative action and video games; what's new and what's coming
• Dealing with AFTRA and SAG - the new deal
• FTC activity in the video games - social media rules
• Fames and social media; legal impact of covergence

Submission Timeline

November 23, 2009

Call for speakers opens. Abstract submission begins.

January 25, 2010

Call for speakers end. No abstracts accepted after this date without prior approval.

February 8, 2010

Sessions selected and speakers notified.

May 10, 2010

Conference opens.

Submitting Abstracts

You will be able to submit abstracts via an online submission process.

Read Speaker Guidelines
Speaker Information Form
Session Proposal Form

Need More Information?

View FAQs
View current agenda
Send us an email