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Lightspeed, GamesBeat and Nasdaq are excited to announce the second year of Game Changers, an annual list celebrating and accelerating 25 extraordinary startups in gaming and interactive media.
More information about this year’s program — such as categories, timeline, and judges for this year’s nomination process — will be shared during GamesBeat Summit 2024 at the Marina del Rey Marriott in Los Angeles. The panel, Lightspeed x GamesBeat Game Changers — Innovations in gaming & interactive media, will take place on May 20 with Moritz Baier-Lentz (partner at Lightspeed), Sophia Xing (director of product at Inworld AI), Chris Bell (CEO of Gardens Interactive), Jani Penttinen (CEO of Bitmagic), and GamesBeat lead writer Dean Takahashi. Submissions for the list this year will open in June.
Together with GamesBeat, Nasdaq, and industry-leading judges, Lightspeed is excited to announce the second year of Game Changers, an annual list celebrating and accelerating 25 extraordinary startups in gaming and interactive media. For the first time, we’ll share more about the categories, timeline, and judges for this year’s nomination process. I’m very excited to do this again and feel like we have better context for it a year later in terms of judging the best startups.
A quick program overview is followed by a panel featuring some of the most exciting innovations in gaming & interactive media—with perspectives from previous winners and judges, which last year included executives and operators from Activision Blizzard, Amazon, ByteDance, DeepMind, Disney, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Google, Inworld AI, Kabam, Krafton, Meta, Microsoft, Niantic, Oculus, Riot Games, Roblox, Stanford, Take-Two, Tencent, TikTok, Unity, Valve, Xbox, YouTube Gaming, and Zynga.
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The session will talk about details like the five categories for the Game Changers program. And the panelists will also talk about their view of the future of gaming when it comes to startup game studios, AI and the innovations in gaming ahead.
A year ago
Last year’s winners included companies like Beamable, Dreamhaven, Gardens, and StatusPro. You can check out the full list here. Lightspeed is sponsoring the Game Changers program with GamesBeat for the second year in a row.
Last year, we asked the gaming and venture communities to nominate the best startups across five key categories:
- Game studios,
- Gaming platforms (e.g., UGC & social),
- Interactive technology (incl. AI & 3D),
- Extended reality (AR/VR/MR), and
- Blockchain & Web3.
All of the entrants had to have been in business no more than five years and have no more than 50 full-time employees. In addition to vision and execution, we also sought to highlight companies that honored principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, and sustainability.
We received an overwhelming amount of quality entries. Between Lightspeed investors and GamesBeat editors, we narrowed the list of entrants to an even 100. We then submitted the nominees to a star panel of judges composed of C-level gaming executives and operators with senior leadership experience across Activision Blizzard, Amazon, Animoca, ByteDance, DeepMind, Disney, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Goldman Sachs, Google, Kabam, Krafton, McKinsey, Meta, Microsoft, Niantic, Oculus, Riot Games, Roblox, Stanford University, Take-Two Interactive, Tencent, TikTok, Unity, Valve, Xbox, YouTube Gaming, Zynga, and others.