Hi everyone. I’m Dr. Jakin Vela, Executive Director of the International Game Developers Association. I hope you’re all having an amazing timezone thus far, and a wonderful August to boot. 

August has been quite a whirlwind for the IGDA headquarters team. We have been busy, busy busy, working towards preparing for our travels to gamescom. If you will be at gamescom this year, the IGDA will have a booth presence in the business area in Hall 3.2, Stand A033. If you’ll be there, please stop by. We have some exciting programming that we’ll be hosting at our booth called Ask Me Anything. It’s going to be a time for you to stop by and ask questions to one of our experts there. The schedule will be posted later, but if you’re interested in stopping by, especially for an Ask Me Anything, please take a look at our upcoming events posting on our website. 

Now with some sad news, I regret to inform the community that we have decided to postpone the GIGAs (the Global Industry Game Awards show) to October due to some staffing issues related to COVID-19 and the continued pandemic. We felt it would be best to really devote additional and extra quality time for the project to ensure that the nominees are celebrated to the best of our ability. We are still so excited about this event. So if you were going to be busy during that week of devcom and gamescom and were not able to attend or view the showing for the GIGAs, don’t worry, we are postponing it to middle-to-late October. We’ll have a final date very soon and once that is established, we will let the community know so you can mark it on your calendar. 

With that said, I hope you have an amazing rest of your August. I will be traveling quite a bit over the next three to three and a half weeks. So, my personal replies and responses may be delayed. However, the IGDA headquarters team is working very hard so do not hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions.

Happy timezone to you all and take care, 

Dr. Jakin Vela