Richard Browne

Richard began his career in writing games back in 1987 on a BBC Micro. He went on to run internal and external development groups for Domark, Psygnosis, Philips Media, Microprose, Universal Interactive and THQ. More recently he founded and ran the external publishing group of Digital Extremes, growing a 30+ team to develop and publish independent projects including Wayfinder in 2023. He now acts as a consultant to development studios and publishers across the globe.

How We Return to Sustainable Development Practices

The past several years has seen an incredible level of growth, investment and in some respects "gambling" on the future of where video games are going. Sadly, that has led to a dead end resulting in mass layoffs and struggles throughout the development world. Teams of 100, 200 and more are creating a product that audiences aren't attaching to, and time has become too valuable to allow more than one of these games to succeed in a player’s life.
In this roundtable, join roundtable leader, Richard Browne, to discuss how we can return to sustainable development practices as an industry. We will discuss questions such as:

• What lessons and frameworks should we be taking from the late 90’s and 00’s in how games and franchises were built over multiple games with smaller core teams? 
• How can we return to building games that scale to players time, and still enjoy the rewards of success?
• How can we better understand and evolve our infrastructure within the business to supplement core development teams with outsourcing and co-dev so that we are building games with nimble boats and not building the Titanic?