Games Gathering 2024

It is the second time during a year when the GAMES GATHERING Conference hearty welcomes all its admirers, as well as the members of the gaming industry that wish to share their experience, knowledge, or contacts with various colleagues. Can you imagine such an event without any members of our amazing SBT Localization Team? It is already a tradition to highlight the brightest and most memorable GG moments in our articles, so this tradition must go on! What did they prepare this time? Let’s deep dive, shall we?

Innovations, experiments, challenges

This winter 1400 thousand members visited a live conference and 400 attended it online. Quite the number already, but it’s just the beginning! GG announced to host not two, but FIVE conferences during 2025 in Ukraine! You can listen to (or share) interesting lectures not just in Kyiv and Lviv but also in Kharkiv, Odesa, and Dnipro! So if you live in one of these cities, always wanted to attend GG but the distance prevented you from doing so, make sure to put the reminder on the following months and subscribe to the event’s Facebook page! Let us know in the comments whether you plan to attend some of them, who knows, maybe we’ll see each other there. 🙂

But those are just some future plans, what we know for sure is 75 Kyiv lectures from Blizzard, Ubisoft Toronto, Plarium, Playtika, Big Medium Small etc.  Each lecture was unique and targeted a specific audience, and we would like to emphasize on some of those (once they are available on conference channel): An Art of self-branding: How to create a powerful brand in game dev (Oleksandra Myronova), Style Creation: Practical advices for visual 2-D game design (Anastasiia Kuznetsova), What to keep in mind when preparing for a game localization (Andrii Raboshchuk), Metalcore, funk and trembita: how we made Ukrainian Fight Drone Simulator OST (Vladyslav Plotnykov, Ruslana Kruchek), Video Game terminology and the like  — work results discussion, future plans and review of the process (Taras Syniuk).

Another novelty of this year’s conference is the Women in Games Brunch, firstly aired on Poznan GIC conference in 2018 that now unites Ukrainian women in game dev! The brunch was filled with the atmosphere of trust, free communication and new acquaintances, so let’s hope it becomes a tradition for the following GGs!

The recruiting zone and AZOV were also very entertaining and filled with awesome guests! It was a place for donations, a place to try out an FPV drone simulator, and talk to military personnel about recruiting and serving in their midst.

Of course, it was not without some minor drawbacks. It is no secret that some of the organizer’s decisions might not be that well-accepted by conference attendees (and they never shy to voice it), so this time there were some noticeable changes and attempts to find a better format for certain moments. The cleverest one concerns the lunches that come in portions and should be marked on the badge. This would eliminate the problems of long queues at the food court and a food shortage for those who got carried away with networking and only received some leftovers from the tables. The solution did solve the problem of crowd concentration in one spot, but the portions themselves were… tiny and looked more like a snack than a full lunch. But that is the first step towards reaching the ideal result!

Besides, the gaming zone got its own separate hall. However, there wasn’t enough space for everyone who wanted to play new interesting games from Ukrainian developers, so they had to go somewhere else to take a breather. Also, it was not that easily tracked because it was located on the opposite side from all other venues.

Of course, there were also traditional meetings with our colleagues! Thank you for pounding this rock with us and working tirelessly, so that new Ukrainian releases could see the light of day!

In addition, MAL’OPUS already opened pre-purchases for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl art book! It’s still a long way from release, but now is the time to start considering such a cool addition to your library!

All things considered, the last conference of this year turned out to be quite good, interesting and containing some new features that hopefully only improve with time and make GG an ever-better event for game industry professionals!

by Bohdana Vozniuk

translated by Olia Khmelnytska

Dec 12, 24