Patrick Klaus is Vice President and General Manager for Electronic Arts’ Motive Studio and has over 20 years of experience in the games industry. In 2019, Patrick returned to Electronic Arts after seven years at Ubisoft Quebec, where he led the studio during the release of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Before that, Patrick spent ten years at Electronic Arts in the United Kingdom in various development, operations, and publishing roles. At Motive, Patrick’s mission and passion are building a world-class team focused on creating innovative AAA action games within iconic worlds where every player feels like the hero. The studio is currently working on a Dead Space remake as well as another unannounced project.

Shiew Yeu Loh joined Amber Studio in May this year as their Art Executive Producer to help with Blockchain Game and NFT Art Production. She will be providing mentorship to the art team as well as coaching them about process, tools and pipeline. 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. During her time at the Sims, Shiew Yeu worked on Sims Nintendo Wii, Sims 3, Sims Medieval, Sims Online Store, Sims Mobile and Sims 4. In 2020, she moved onto Pocket Gems as an Art Manager to oversee the mobile game War Dragon by working with the dev team, art leadership and outsourcing vendors. She was also in charge of implementing diversity and inclusion content into their character library. Shiew Yeu has been a speaker at various game industry conferences regarding being a mother in the game industry as well as topics that center around diversity and inclusion.

Eric has credits on over 100 video game titles and on more than 30 animated releases throughout his tenure with High Voltage Software. He has collaborated with the likes of Tim Burton, Jon Favreau, Seth McFarlane and Hideo Kojima. Some of his recent experience with mainstream gaming includes Fortnite, the Walking Dead and Saints Row series. Eric is passionate about creating jaw dropping entertainment and bringing people from all over the world together. His creativity is boundless, which is nice, because his task load is similarly boundless.

Matt has spent his 15+ year career furthering his passion for exdev across multiple games and software studios. He continues to promote cross team collaboration while leading, mentoring, and coaching teams to improve all aspects of external production.

Laurent Lugbull has worked at Ubisoft for over 22 years, in a variety of positions on both business and production side. Today, he’s in charge of defining the Procurement Strategy for all Production and Marketing needs. Based at Ubisoft HQ in Paris, France, his current role involves understanding the market and Ubisoft’s needs, supporting dedicated local procurement teams who accompany Ubisoft dev and marketing teams in their search for external partners and facilitate the business relationship with them.

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.

Kassi began her career in gaming over 13 years ago working in external development. Since then, she's worked on over 100 titles, been a Producer, and expanded the outsourcing & localization department to 11 studios worldwide. She currently is the Outside Services Director and runs all external services for Glu Mobile, including external development, localization, and independent contractors. She enjoys working with external teams and implementing them so they feel ownership of the game they are working on. She's presented at numerous international and US conferences. Kassi holds a BA in Communication and an MBA.

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.

I’m Arthur, a French guy living in France and yes, as all my countrymen, I am a foodie. I’ve been working at Ubisoft Procurement for 6 years, handling Production & Marketing External Services at HQ. That includes basically any kind of service that is being discussed here at XDS but also Media, Events or Esports for e.g. Our goal, together with our Montreal counterparts, is to make sure our studios are working with the right partners, with the right commercial conditions and with minimum risk.