Greetings,

As you might notice, I have a different background than usual, and that’s because I’m in São Paulo, Brazil! I’m really excited to have the opportunity to attend an amazing conference that pulled together thought leaders from around the world, and the best and brightest minds across Brazil, to discuss how best to support emerging and developing ecosystems to ensure that everyone knows what’s going on with games and around the world. It was such an inspiring moment, because I see so many themes come up in these conversations of community and support, and understanding of how to navigate government funding and public policy. It’s just makes me so appreciative that what we do here at IGDA is exactly all of those things, as we provide a community to support developers with other developers who have either gone through or are going through something very similar. Together they can partner up and work cohesively to get through anything.

I also had the pleasure of attending the Game Jam plus event, the award finals, in Rio de Janeiro. It was such an inspiring moment of people coming together, learning, growing, accelerating their skills, but also making some amazing games. The talent and the spirit of community here is so so inspiring.

Lastly, I am attending BIG, which starts today as I record this, I’m very excited to be a part of the largest event in games industry for Latin America. I really am looking forward to it since it will be my first time not only in Brazil, but my first time going to BIG festival.

Everyone has been so amazing, and I absolutely cannot wait to share more information about how my trip here has impacted me and the organization as well – all in positive ways. In fact, speaking in positive ways, we also just relaunched one of our chapters here in Brazil in São Paulo. So the new São Paulo chapter will be ready to make events and meetings and host all these amazing talks. I’m very excited to see what the future has for the local community here. It’s been nothing but amazing and inspiring, and filled with creativity and brilliance.

I also want to keep in mind that we are still looking for responses for our Developer Satisfaction Survey (DSS). We really need your help to ensure that we put out the best data, and this data is strengthened when more people take the survey and share with everyone in our community. So please, if you have not yet, definitely take our development satisfaction survey, you’ll find the link here.

Feel free to take a look around at our additional benefits and our other events going on. We’ll be at gamescom and I’ll have more information about that coming very soon. But until then, I hope everyone has an amazing time zone!

Take care,

Dr. Jakin Vela

Executive Director, IGDA