Closed-door conversation with studio heads, publishing leads and platform executives from across the industry.
Research-driven perspective on live-ops economics, retention and the real cost of a two-year production cycle.
Best-practice exchange you can take back to your own greenlight meeting on Monday.
We'll keep things fairly informal, but will make sure to cover the following:
Introductions and a brief spotlight on Marcus Iyer, Studio Head at Northgate Interactive, whose team has run the same live title for six years without a reboot, to kick off the conversation.
Group roundtable discussion on staffing a live-ops team that does not depend on the original leads, and what happens to a roadmap when the founding designers move on.
Q&A and best practice exchange on season cadence, the real margin on a battle pass, and when sunsetting a title is the responsible call.
Marcus has run Northgate Interactive for nine years, through two console generations and one platform transition that took half the studio with it. His team has kept the same live title running for six years without a reboot, which in this industry is closer to a rescue operation than a roadmap.
Before Northgate he spent a decade in production at two AAA publishers, shipping four titles and cancelling three. He talks about the cancelled ones more, and says they taught him more about staffing a live game than the ships did.
Hunter Menton's invite-only executive roundtables assemble VP+ leaders from Fortune 5000 companies around the problems they're already trying to solve. His venture-backed AI and fintech clients see qualified discovery meetings in named accounts within 120 to 180 days, and most stay for 12 to 18 months.
He also founded Summit Together Foundation, whose inaugural campaign climbs 14,003-foot Huron Peak to raise $25,000 for CurePSP, a cause he took up after his father-in-law's MSA diagnosis. Away from work, he's a cigar aficionado, global travel and art enthusiast, and avid hiker.
Dale Dubberley is the founder and CEO of Drive Growth Management, and has spent more than four decades in retail designing growth management systems and customer experience strategies for multi-location brands. Dale hosts the Profitability Roundtable, where retail executives confront the hidden profit leaks that scale into margin erosion.
The approach is anchored in numbers: a 5% gain in customer retention can lift profits by as much as 95%, while frontline turnover in a 1,000-person retailer can cost $3M a year. Away from the work, Dale is a self-described wanna-be surfer along the British Columbia coast.
Playfield brings together the people who actually decide what gets built in games: studio heads, executive producers, publishing leads and platform partners. We run small, off-the-record roundtables where the conversation is worth the hour.
We host closed-door sessions of ten to twelve senior leaders around one question that matters this quarter. No panels, no slides, no vendor pitches. Everyone in the room ships games for a living.
