Building games as an indie or AAA studio is serious business. Join the Amazon Appstore and AWS during our GDC developer day event on March 15^th, 2016 as we teach you everything from game ideation, creation, scaling, monetization, marketing, polishing and publishing. We have an incredible line up of speakers, including Amazon evangelists and industry thought leaders from Twitch, Backflip Studios, Yacht Club Games and King. Come get practical advice and best practices on how to scale the business side of your game development. The developer day is part of the official GDC programming, so if you are attending GDC make sure to come out and check out the full list of talks we’ll be giving. Click here to register.

From a One Person Shop to Indie Dev to AAA: What It Really Takes to Grow

10:00am-11:00am

We've entered a golden age of creativity and experimentation. Today, anyone with an idea can build a game and publish it to a global audience.  How does the gifted amateur become a pro game developer, and from there, a games industry success story? Hint: it requires more than just programming or artistic talent. In this session, we'll show you how to approach game development as a business - even if business isn't your "thing." We'll look at the single most-important skill you can develop, and show by example what happens if you neglect it. We'll also offer practical insights on choosing a game genre, development environment, and target hardware as well as how to monetize your game.

The Best of All Worlds, Your Tech and the Cloud

11:20am-12:20pm

Game developers are used to building their own technology. But in today's world, the global reach and scale of cloud-based architectures is no longer just an advantage, it's becoming a necessity. Third party services built on top of cloud service platforms are also in the mix. How do you leverage the best of what you have, and connect to the best of the cloud for your game? Learn how to reduce operational complexity, go serverless, and let the cloud handle the heavy lifting.

The Power of a Fanbase: Growing Your Audience with Twitch

12:20pm-1:20pm

In the future, the top games will have fully realized fan bases that will drive their user acquisition and engagement engines. Without it, high customer acquisition costs and low customer life-time value can sink any game. How can you turn your players into fans? Broadcasters need interesting content to show on their channels, and game developers need to get their games in front of players. Leveraging Twitch in your game development process helps build an audience and keep them interested. Come hear experienced broadcasters and developers discuss new content opportunities you can use to expand your broadcast and better engage viewers with Twitch.

From Idea to Appstore: Building Successful Cross Platform Games With Yacht Club Games

1:20pm-2:20pm

Gone are the days where you can make a game and publish it to a single platform expecting a sure fire success. Yacht Club Games will talk about their experience porting their game Shovel Knight to Fire TV, and we'll walk through how to take a raw idea and turn it into a shippable product. In this session you’ll learn how to build games that scale correctly across multiple platforms, including how to design your game to work across multiple resolutions, different input devices and on different types of hardware.

From Mobile Games to AAA Titles, Using Amazon Kinesis, Redshift, and DynamoDB to Figure out What Your Players Love Most

2:40pm - 3:40pm

Long term success and viral marketing for your game requires knowing what your players love most. The better you predict and the faster you can respond to players' behavior, the deeper you can engage them with core game and meta game features. Learn how a real-time analytics pipeline for games using Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon DynamoDB can make the difference for your game. Walk through an analytics architecture, and discover tips and tricks other studios have used to great success with millions of players world-wide.

Three New Ways to Monetize and How Backflip Studios Uses Them

4:00pm - 4:30pm

The average game developer only monetizes 2-3% of their customers. What if you could monetize 100% of them? We'll talk with Bryan Mashinter from Backflip Studios about three new ways to do this. In this session you'll learn about: Amazon Underground, where customers get premium apps and in-app items for free and developers get paid for all of the minutes used; Merch by Amazon, a self-service on-demand T-Shirt printing service with no out of pocket cost to you; and Amazon Coins, to help deepen engagement and improve your ARPU (average revenue per user).

Challenging the Way We Do Things: Lessons from the Latest King Hit Game

4:30pm - 5:00pm

King has built some of the world’s most popular casual social games, including hits like Candy Crush Saga which is available in over 200 countries around the world and enjoyed daily by millions. King builds games with a broad appeal, synchronized across platforms, allowing players to switch seamlessly between devices and platforms and continue their game wherever they left off. Come learn how one of Kings latest hit game, Blossom Blast Saga, was created. Hear about their development journey and what decisions were made to create this game in record time with half the normal team size. You'll also get a first look at King's new, free, light-weight game engine, Defold, running on Fire OS and learn how easy it is to publish your game to the Amazon Appstore.

- Jesse Freeman (@jessefreeman)