Tentacle Zone | International Publishers and New Business Models

International publishers and new business models.

Meet 4 exciting international game publishers and learn what new business models excite them. Discover new ways to reach game markets.

About this event

The Tentacle Zone brought together 4 exciting international game publishers to discuss accessing markets that otherwise developers may not have considered. Each of these publishers has an interesting business model for the game developers they are looking to sign up. From the event, we learned a little bit about each of them before diving into questions from the event participants.

The speakers

Mafalda Duarte

Mafalda Duarte is a producer at Nerd Monkeys, a Lisbon based developer studio, that promotes a creative environment. She’s a proud ambassador for Women in Games and an activist for the Portuguese game dev’s ecosystem, from her work at the volunteer group A Ludoteca, to fostering digital communities. Recently she was one of the organisers for Invest in Indie games, in an effort to bring more opportunities to indie devs around the world – a turning point for the publishing endeavours of Nerd Monkeys.

Marc Melton

Marc joined Marvelous Europe as General Manager in 2019 and the team have refocused the business to be a publisher that is agile, capable and relevant in a rapidly evolving global gaming ecosystem. Marvelous Europe Limited is the European arm of the Marvelous group, a listed company on the Tokyo stock exchange. Marvelous is an entertainment company at heart but continues to be most notably a video game developer and publisher. Marvelous’ most popular franchises include Story of Seasons, Rune Factory and Daemon X Machina, in addition to third-party acquisitions such as Granblue Fantasy Versus and the much anticipated Indie title Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin which launches in November 2020.

Chris Wulf

Christopher Wulf is the publishing director for Romanian publisher TAG, the developer behind the friendship-ruining party game ‘Move or Die’ and publisher of monster-dating game ‘Monster Prom’ & strategy deck building title ‘Floppy Knights’.

His main focus at TAG is overseeing their publishing activities and handling business development as part of the expansion of the publishing and development branch of the company.

Gwen Foster

Gwen worked as a Senior Producer for independent game companies in Southeast Asia while organising for IGDA Philippines – Manila Chapter, and eventually becoming a catalyst for Rising SEA – a Regional Game Jam, and Pathfindin.gs – a Global South Initiative. She specialises in business development, publishing, and production. Gwen works with SUPERHOT, Yogscast Games, Schell Games, and Well Told Entertainment.