Carla has been active in the games industry since 2005 where she started as an Artist at Supersonic Software in the UK. She's been focused on External Development for 10+ years both in the UK and Canada at game developers such as Microsoft's Lionhead Studio, XBOX's The Coalition Studio, and EA.

In 2022, Carla acquired the role of Head of External Production with Behaviour Digital, owning the development process for all External Production.

Carla's passion for process, culture, team management, and KPIs has led her to host various talks at XDS conferences.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Alex Stein has worked in the video games industry for over 20 years, with roughly half of that involved in external development. He has a passion for establishing and improving pipelines, and for helping improve development practices industry wide.

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.

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.

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.

I am a Shanghai native who grew up on hockey and maple syrup. I started in the game industry as the co-founder and CEO of Mindwalk Studios, a computer graphics and animation outsource company based in Beijing. As of January 2018, I took on a new challenge as the Service Line Director for Keywords Art and Marketing Services serving 1400 employees worldwide, supporting them to deliver the highest quality, innovative, and creative art that is true to our client’s vision.

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.

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.