GDC Festival of Gaming has announced the featured speakers who’ll be taking to the stage during its new Luminaries Speaker Series.
A fresh addition for 2026, organizers are pitching the Luminaries Speaker Series as a three-day program geared towards “senior decision-makers” across the video game industry.
“These big-picture, executive-level sessions will focus on the macro forces shaping the business of games and the future of the games industry: emerging platforms, transformative technologies, global shifts, cultural trends, IP ecosystems, and big-picture strategy,” reads an announcement.
Inaugural Luminaries include leaders from Google, Mattel, Nvidia, Bandai Namco Studios, Savvy Games, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and more.
GDC Festival of Gaming attendees with a Game Changer pass will be able to access the Luminaries Speaker Series, which will run from March 10 to March 12 at the 500-seater Blue Shield of California Theater at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
You can find a select list of Luminaries Speaker Series sessions below. More will be announced in the coming weeks.
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AI Trends and Futures: Ask Us Anything!
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Bryan Catanzaro, VP Applied Deep Learning Research at NVIDIA
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Alexandre Moufarek, Product Lead, Inception at Google DeepMind
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Julien Merceron, CTO of Bandai Namco Studios
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Fireside Chat with Brian Ward, CEO of Savvy Games
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Brian Ward, CEO of Savvy Games
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The Attention Equation: How Gaming Wins Consumer Focus and What Comes Next
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Kabir Ahuja, Senior Partner of McKinsey & Co.
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Ichiro Otobe, Sr. Client Development Advisor of McKinsey & Co.
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Itamar Benedy, CEO of Anzu.io
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Moritz Baier-Lentz, Partner & Head of Gaming, Lightspeed Venture Partners
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Other Notable Speakers Include:
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John Spitzer, VP of Developer and Performance Technology at NVIDIA
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Marcus Liassides, SVP, Global Head of Digital at Mattel
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Bill Kleyman, Co-founder, CEO of Apolo.us
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Game Developer and GDC Festival of Gaming are sibling companies under the Informa Festivals banner.
