GDC 2024 Session Viewer

Baier-Lentz, Moritz

Title: Partner, Head of Gaming

Company: Lightspeed Venture Partners

Moritz Baier-Lentz is a Partner and the Head of Gaming at Lightspeed, a globally leading venture capital firm with over $29 billion in capital under management and more than 500 investments across the U.S., Europe, and Asia—including Epic Games, Stability AI, and Snap. Moritz loves to partner with exceptional entrepreneurs and has invested over $100 million into the gaming industry—including founders who have led the creation of games like Fortnite, Call of Duty, League of Legends, Wild Rift, Apex Legends, Overwatch, Valorant, StarCraft II, and Warcraft III. Previously, Moritz was a partner and management team member at BITKRAFT. He personally raised over $200 million and, with the founders, scaled the firm to become the most active gaming investor of 2020, 2021, and 2022. Moritz led many of the funds’ marquee early-stage deals, including Inworld AI, Theorycraft Games, and Raid Base—achieving top-decile IRR (collective valuations over $2 billion) and attracting 9-figure follow-on investments from Amazon, Disney, Epic Games, Google, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, NetEase, Niantic, Nintendo, Riot Games, Sony, Take-Two, Tencent, and Ubisoft. Before joining BITKRAFT, Moritz was a Vice President at Goldman Sachs, where he founded and led the firm's global gaming practice. During his 5-year tenure, he advised the world's largest gaming and technology corporations on over $300 billion in transaction volume across M&A, IPOs, VC, and other strategic transactions—including Dell’s $67 billion acquisition of EMC and IBM’s $34 billion Red Hat purchase. A lifelong gamer, Moritz spent his teenage years competitively playing Blizzard’s Diablo II, culminating in a global #1 ranking among over 12 million players in 2003. The first person in his family to graduate high school, he traded the digital swords and armor that he earned in-game to afford his college tuition—two decades before NFTs entered the mainstream. Moritz holds an M.B.A. and M.A. from Stanford, where he graduated as Arjay Miller Scholar and ERP Scholar ("German Rhodes"). He was recognized among the "30 Under 30" (Forbes), "40 Under 40" (Capital), "Young Leaders" (Atlantik-Brücke), and "Young Global Leaders" (World Economic Forum). His recent speaking engagements include Harvard, Stanford, M.I.T., Goldman Sachs, Forbes, New York Times, SXSW, and GDC. In his personal time, Moritz is an avid Ironman and ultramarathon athlete, including the 250km Marathon des Sables and the World Marathon Challenge (7 marathons on 7 continents in 7 days). With his races, he has raised over $250,000 for depression research.

Cheng, Kwan

Title: Eggy Party Producer and General Manager of Eggy Studio

Company: NetEase Games

Eggy Party Producer and General Manager of Eggy Studio at NetEase Games

Ding, Chenwei

Title: Senior Technical Engineer

Company: NetEase

Chenwei Ding is a Senior Technical Engineer of NetEase. He has participated in the development of recommender systems built in games such as a Chinese Ghost Story Online. With keen interests in machine learning, he has published academic papers at conferences such as Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). And he also serves as a reviewer at the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) and the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). In the general field of AI, he is interested in interpretable machine learning and causality-related researches. He also enjoys online video games and varies kinds of sports, especially ball games.

Eppinette, Michael V.

Title: Sr. Concept Artist

Company: NetEase Games

Michael Eppinette is a Professional Creature Designer and Concept Artist who began working in the film industry in 2016. Michael has always loved creatures, both real and imaginary. As a student, he was a volunteer zookeeper at the Houston Zoo. Upon winning a creature design contest with the Stan Winston School of Character Arts during his final year of high school, he flew to Los Angeles to see his first creature design transformed into a 7 ft tall monster suit. From there, he was introduced to Alec Gillis at Studio ADI, who let him cut his teeth sketching for an early design phase of Shane Black's "The Predator". In the following years, he worked as a designer and modeler on many other properties and Studio ADI projects, including "Prey", the most recent installment of the Predator franchise in 2022, where he was charged with designing and modeling the titular monster. Since then, Michael has moved to the videogame industry as a Senior Concept Artist for NetEase Games, where he has continued to this day designing creatures, monsters and characters for fantasy and scifi properties.

Gonzalez, Debbie

Title: EP / Head of Studio

Company: The Sound Lab a Keywords Studio

Debbie Gonzalez is the Executive Producer and Head of Studio at Sound Lab a Keywords Studio. Debbie studied Music Production and Engineering at Berklee College of Music and in 1988, moved to Los Angeles and began producing music and sound design for hundreds of projects with the top composers and sound designers across the entertainment industry. In 2014 she partnered with acclaimed sound pioneer, Scott Gershin, and in 2016 launched The Sound Lab at Technicolor, which became The Sound Lab a Keywords Studio in August 2018. She co-leads and supports the Sound Lab team of Sound Designers, Implementors, Composers and Mixers in their focus to create and implement immersive sound experiences spanning across the multiple mediums of Games, TV, Film, VR, Location Based Entertainment and Commercials/Trailers. Game credits include, Arcadegeddon for Illfonic, Bayonetta 3 with Platinum Games, Valorant, and Legends of Runeterra for Riot Games, Forza for Turn 10, Doom Eternal for Id Software, Spyro’s Adventure for Toys for Bob, Final Fantasy with Square Enix, Devil May Cry 5 with Capcom, numerous titles with Tencent and NetEase and many others. Film and Streaming projects include the Oscar Shortlisted, Pinocchio/Netflix from Guillermo del Toro, the Emmy winning Maya and the Three/Netflix and Mrs. America, for FX/Hulu with Cate Blanchett.

Liu, Tony

Title: Head of Eggy Party Brand Marketing North America

Company: NetEase Games

Liu, Yongcheng

Title: Producer and UX leader

Company: NetEase

Yongcheng Liu is in charge of NetEase Game UX department. He leads a UX department of 100 people, including data technology, UI/UX, user research, community management and so on. He has been involved in the development of a large number of successful NetEase Games products and is highly influential in the UX area of the Chinese gaming industry. Recently, he has also been the producer of the console version of Naraka: Bladepoint.

Qiao, Xin

Title: Senior Software Engineer

Company: LIGHTSPEED STUDIOS

Xin Qiao serves as a senior software engineer at LIGHTSPEED STUDIOS, specializing in research and development primarily focused on Character Animation and Machine Learning. Before joining LIGHTSPEED STUDIOS, he worked for NetEase Game, where his responsibilities included building real-time animation systems using machine learning techniques. Xin holds an M.S. degree in Software Engineering from Tsinghua University.

Sun, Peng

Title: Senior Copywriting and Planning Specialist

Company: NetEase Games

Tao, Jianrong

Title: CTO of Game Dpt. at GrowEase

Company: NetEase

My name is Jianrong Tao, but you can call me WindSky. As the CTO of Game Dpt. at GrowEase Div., NetEase, I am a technical expert with extensive knowledge and practical experience in game AI. I am passionate about using artificial intelligence technology to empower the game industry, reduce costs, and increase efficiency. My goal is to unleash the creativity of game developers and enhance the gaming experience of players. I have developed an artificial intelligence solution that encompasses the entire game development process, from R&D to testing and operation. This solution includes competitive bots, anti-cheating mechanisms, intelligent matchmaking and recommender systems, intelligent NPCs, intelligent testing and art asset generation. My research results have been used in popular games such as "Justice", "A Chinese Ghost Story", "Revelation", "Naraka: Bladepoint", "World of Warcraft", "Counter-Strike: Global Offensive", "Dream of Three Ancient Kingdoms 2", and "Slam Dunk". I have applied for more than 40 invention patents and developed more than 10 software works. I have a Ph.D. in computer science from Zhejiang University and currently serve as an off-campus tutor for Zhejiang University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen). I have extensive research experience in reinforcement learning, imitation learning, data mining, and user modeling, and have published nearly 50 papers in prestigious journals and conferences such as KDD, AAAI, WWW, IJCAI, and TKDE. I have won the best paper awards of Ubicomp2016, CoG2020, and SMDS2020. Additionally, I serve as a member of the program committees of ACM Information and Knowledge Management Conference, ACM Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Conference, and IEEE Data Mining Conference. I am also a member of the Executive Committee of ACM Hangzhou Branch. I am dedicated to pushing the boundaries of what is possible for game AI and I am excited to see what the future holds for the intersection of AI and gaming.

Xu, Zechen

Title: Senior Game Designer and Data Product Manager

Company: NetEase

Zechen XU is currently a designer of NetEase. He focuses on solutions to leverage data flow throughout an entire product lifecycle, and to help game designer to build and perfect game productions. He participated in helping game design for several games, including Naraka:Bladepoint, Ghost, UNO!, Revelation Mobile

Xu, Guozhi

Title: AI Team Leader

Company: ByteDance

Guozhi Xu, also known as Shu Zhi in ByteDance, was born in Jiangsu, China, in 1992. In 2021, he became a part of ByteDance, where he now leads the AI team in exploring generative AI for game development. His work includes various aspects such as 2D/3D avatar creation, facial/body mocap, non-player character (NPC) interaction, audio-to-facial/body motion animation, and text-to-cinematic animation. Supporting a virtual idol group called 'A-Soul' together with 'Lydia' in facial mocap pipeline. In 'Earth: Revival' he implement LLMs in character creation and User-NPC dialog systems. Before that, Guozhi spent five years at NetEase as a Senior Computer Vision Engineer where he developed AI applications, including facial recognition systems, image recognition systems, anti-spam systems. He enjoyed his short internships both in Tencent Youtu Lab and Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences under the supervision of Professor Weiming Dong.

Yang, Xinhui

Title: Senior Project Manager

Company: NetEase

Xinhui Yang (Julia) is currently a senior project manager at NetEase, and is responsible for game localization, including multilingual translation, cultural adaptation and audio dubbing. She graduated from the University of Manchester, UK, majored in Audiovisual Translation & Interpretation Studies. Having over 6 years of industry experience, she has worked in many countries, including the UK, Switzerland and Japan. She has a deep understanding of the differences between cultures and is very open-minded. She specializes in analyzing the in-game sound needs of players from different cultures to better enhance the user immersion experience. She is also fluent in 6 languages and has her own unique perspective on creating diverse and international games, and hopes that through music and language diversity, she can help promote Chinese games to the world and Eastern culture to overseas players.

Yang, Guanchao (Vigil)

Title: Game Director

Company: LightSpeed Studios

Guanchao Yang, a seasoned game industry professional since 2011, assumed the role of game director and producer at LIGHTSPEED STUDIOS after successfully launching two MOBA titles at NetEase Game. Under his leadership, he spearheaded the development and release of "Fight for the Golden Spatula" (FFGS), a game that has thrived for three years in live operation, captivating millions of daily active players and revolutionizing their gaming experience.

Zhang, Hazel

Title: Head of Investments

Company: AELF

Hazel Zhang serves as the Head of Investment at aelf, where she brings her extensive investment experience in bulge brackets, big tech and venture capital to the blockchain ecosystem. She is responsible for implementing aelf’s vertical and stage-agnostic investment strategy including sourcing and structuring new investment opportunities around emerging projects and businesses bridging Web2 to Web3. Prior to her role at aelf, Hazel was heading Web3 investments in NetEase Games, driving global investments in the pan-entertainment and blockchain space. Hazel is also an Advisor at Stanford AI & Web3 Research Lab Association and holds a Master’s degree in Financial Economics from the University of Oxford.