Carla is a video games industry veteran with over 20 years of experience, specializing in External Development for more than a decade. She has held key roles at Xbox (The Coalition, Lionhead), EA (XDI), and Behaviour Interactive.

Her passion for process, culture, and team management has led her to speak at several XDS conferences, where she champions efficiency, inclusion, and best practices.

As Head of Business Solutions for XDS Spark and Chair of the XDS Advisory Committee, she is dedicated to advancing industry knowledge, fostering strong partnerships, and driving sustainable practices.

External Development veteran and XDS Advisory Committee member who started in the games industry as an artist. Began working with external teams at Sumo Digital in 2007, before becoming Outsource Manager; successfully guiding Sumo’s fledgling India studio into a fully integrated partner, while overseeing their rapidly expanding external development program. Took a central position at Xbox Games Studios in 2014 to support and guide their Global Studios with External Development Partnerships.

In 2024, after 10 years at Xbox he left to co-found XDS Spark with Chris Wren. A platform designed to bring service providers and buyers together while advancing and advocating for external developments exciting future.

Isabelle has been working at Ubisoft for more than 15 years, where she's been an active and passionate player for all aspects related to collaboration.

After spending multiple years as a CoDev & Outsourcing Project Manager, she joined Assassin's Creed Valhalla development team in 2018 as their Associate Producer Co-development.

Isabelle now acts as a Director of Partnerships, CoDev & Outsourcing on the Assassin's Creed Brand. Her long-term experience is an asset for the production teams to ensure it keeps evolving their ways of working in collaboration with studios around the world; but also to continue building strong relationships with both internal and external partners.

Isabelle has also been an active member of the XDS Advisory Committee since 2016.

Caroline brings over 11 years of expertise in the games industry, specializing in external development, fostering healthy partnerships, and spearheading initiatives for positive social impact. As a Senior Game Producer at Riot Games, she was a key member of the central external development team, focusing on relationship management with Riot's external game dev partners. Previously at EA, Caroline honed her skills in both game production and external development best practices. Known for her leadership and innovative approach, Caroline is passionate about building partnerships, driving social impact through gaming and implementing methodologies that are both efficient and human-centric through creative problem-solving.

Guillaume began his video game industry career early at Ubisoft where he worked on several famous AAA titles. In 2009, with his knowledge in marketing and business development, Guillaume joined and later became the COO of Glass Egg Digital Media - one of the world’s leading 3D art outsourcing companies.

With his passion & depth of experience in the game industry, he has been a driving force to the company's development through recruitment, client expansion, branding and marketing.

With over 10 years of production experience in the games industry Toby has recently joined the new studio That’s No Moon Entertainment as their VP of Global Production.  He is responsible for the identification, contracting, onboarding, relationship management, and production management of all external partnerships for the studio.

In the past he has worked on large scale external art production on titles such as Days Gone, Death Stranding, Marvel’s Spider-man, and MLB The Show amongst others.

David Lam has been working in the games industry for over 20 years. He started out locally in Vancouver as a student at VFS and quickly found himself drawn to character art. David has had a long career at Electronic Arts working on titles such as SSX, NBA Street, Need for Speed, FIFA, and NHL. During his time as a production artist, David found enjoyment and fulfillment in teaching. He has taught BCIT, Think Tank Training Center, and VanArts. He has also participated as a demo artist for Wacom. David joined Bioware in 2012 as an Associate External Art Director and continued in a broader role as Senior Art Manager supporting the Edmonton, Montreal and Austin studios. In 2018, David accepted a new role at Turn10, a first party Xbox studio, as Senior Producer supporting external development for the Forza franchise. In 2021, David was recruited by Riot to lead one of their key art teams on League of Legends as Director of Art Management. David has recently moved on from Riot as he accepted a new role with Netease as Executive Producer of ADC in North America. David also has an expanded role with XDS as co-chair of the XDS Advisory Board.

After 15 years of project management and systems work in Energy, JC found his calling at BioWare in 2005. Ever since, he has been expanding and enhancing the studio group’s ability to create the best story-based games in the world through global partnerships in art, animation, cinematics, UI/UX, and engineering. JC has worked on every BioWare title since Neverwinter Nights, including Jade Empire, the Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises, Anthem, and all unannounced titles.

Carl got his start in games in 1994. Carl has worked at small and large companies alike from a buyer and a service provider perspective, most notably Michael Crichton’s Timeline Entertainment, Nvidia, Electronic Arts and his current role as Senior Director of External Development at Zynga. In this Business Operations role, he has built a worldwide organization which facilitates all of Zynga’s external development and partner relations involving Art, Engineering, Audio, UI/UX, Co-Dev, QA, Localization/LQA, Narrative, UA and Marketing/Publishing. In addition, Carl helps coordinate and facilitate M&A integrations for Zynga and its subsidiaries.

Arun Honne-Gowda, with over 19 years of experience has managed and led at various levels, started his career as a 3D art generalist, initiated & lead a CG animation service studio in India and worked for studios like Sony, EA, MPC, Axis, Jagex where he worked on games (console, VR, mobile and PC), CG animation, CG movies; titles like RuneScape, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit, Book of Spells, Project Morpheus, Prometheus, Clash of the Titans, Sucker Punch and others. With the experience of working on both sides of external development / outsourcing and small & large global teams, he is passionate about distributed development, championing xDev for teams to scale up with speed.

From her early years as both a gymnastics and diving athlete, Nikki has turned her lifelong connection with movement into a thriving career as a technical artist and UX designer. Nikki has spent her professional career navigating the pipelines of real-time development at companies such as Apple, EA, Lucasfilm and now Google. She specializes in real-time interactions and focuses on experiences that capture and represent assets in seamless and innovative ways.

With experience in games, film, virtual production, VR, ML and AR, Nikki is passionate about fostering collaboration across these industries and empowering diverse perspectives to push the boundaries of real-time development.

Co-founder of Twisted Works, Ciaran brings over a decade of leadership experience from PlayStation Studios. Formerly leading External Development, Art, and Animation at London Studio, he excels at refining complex processes, building scalable workflows, and fostering partner collaboration across teams, projects and regions. He now takes this expertise forward, overseeing operations at Twisted Works to create a sustainable, scalable development studio that leverages the strength of external partnerships to create engaging and meaningful shared experiences.

Walter de Torres is a Founding Partner of Pixel Mafia, an art services company located in the Philippines. After more than 15 years directly managing game development teams, Walter, alongside Coby Chan decided to switch over to the services side of the games industry by establishing Pixel Mafia in 2017. Prior to this, Walter was the Head of Production for the Gears of War franchise at The Coalition Studio and before that, he was a Group Development Director at EA.

Phil is the Co-Dev and Outsource Lead for Amazon Games. He has over 30 years of game development experience as a Content Creator, Art Director and Program Manager. Phil guides the strategy and implementation of external development across Amazon Games, supporting all development teams, disciplines and central groups. He manages partner relationships, and builds the systems and processes that lead to successful outcomes.

Dave Sanderson is a 20-year veteran of the entertainment industry, holding lead roles in business and creative development across the spectrum of games, film, and television. Dave has specialized in external development since 2015 and joined the XDS Advisory Committee in 2020. In 2024, Dave joined Scopely, leading ExDev on an unannounced global title.

While being a gamer from his childhood, Sviatoslav began his professional journey in the gaming industry in his early 20s, being involved in PC MMO FPS game development at Vostok Games before his passion for gaming led him to become CEO of Room 8 Studio; a games development company, and later transformed to the Room 8 Group, 1700+ talent company located in more than 10 countries, the most organically fast growing company in external development globally. Family-first, challenge-driven and quality obsessed.

Shiew Yeu Loh is the Senior Art Outsourcing Manager at Riot Games overseeing RND projects. Before Riot, she was the Art Executive Producer at Amber Studio heading up Blockchain Game and NFT Art Production. At both places, she coached and mentored the art team to create mature processes, scalable and sustainable pipelines as well as enforcing alignment across the team. A game industry veteran, she started as a texture artist, a generalist and a producer in 2004 before working at Electronic Arts as the Senior External Development Artist for 14 years in the Sims Franchise. In 2020, she moved onto Pocket Gems as an Art Manager to oversee the art production for mobile game War Dragon as well as implementing diversity and inclusion content into their character library. She has been an avid speaker at various game industry conferences regarding being a mother in the game industry as well as topics that center around effective communication, empowering OS managers and diversity.

At Snowed In Studios, Nigel is part of the management team that planned the growth of the studio from 25 to 200 game developers over five years. A project manager by training, Nigel has scaled up studios and game dev teams since 1994 in the US and Canada. Nigel was the producer for Next Level Games’ first console titles, development director at EA Black Box for the Need for Speed series, and he ran development for over 30 TV streaming apps including the Disney and NFL platforms. He holds an MBA from the University of Ottawa.