The program for the Arab session of the WN Conference has been announced, featuring speakers from Ubisoft and Mundfish

On February 11-12, the WN Conference will take place in Abu Dhabi. The preliminary program for the event has already been announced. Among other things, it will feature a roundtable on working in the Gulf countries and a presentation focused on growth opportunities in the Middle Eastern gaming market.

The conference runs on both days in two streams—from 11:00 AM to 4:30 PM (GMT+4, which is one hour ahead of Moscow). The majority of presentations are scheduled to last 25-30 minutes, with exceptions for roundtables, which will take an hour each.

Key presentations on the first day include:

A speech by Saifi Ismail, director and president of Yalla Group, who will discuss his experience developing a social network (Yalla) and gaming ecosystem tailored for the local audience in the region;
A public interview with Robert Bagratuni, head of Mundfish, conducted by Julia Lebedeva, partner and executive director of WN Media Group. She will talk to Robert about maintaining a balance between business and creativity in game development;
A roundtable with Pieter van der Pijl from Triple Dragon, Alexandra Kurdyumova from FUTURA.digital, and Lucy Chow from Women in Games, focusing on building business connections in the Middle Eastern gaming industry;
A presentation by Nick Phipps, senior game designer at Ubisoft Belgrade, who will discuss game design elements that need to be considered when setting up monetization components.

For the presentations on the second day, highlights include:

A roundtable on gaming market trends featuring Sultan Al Riyami from AD Gaming, Robert Bagratuni from Mundfish, Paul Dawalibi from Holodeck Ventures, David Fernandez Remesal from Sandsoft, Sali Elagab from Shorooq Partners, and Kirill Gurskiy from GEM Capital;
A talk by Sarah Golshahi, business development manager at Cafe Bazaar, focused on opportunities that can be found in niche areas of the Middle Eastern gaming industry today;
A presentation by Chris Bain, founder of Player One Consulting (formerly spent almost 10 years working on promoting Xbox in Europe), discussing product strategy development;
A talk by Nikita Matsokin, executive director of MGVC, about new opportunities and approaches for mobile game developers in a rapidly evolving market.

All information on the lecture program and other aspects of the upcoming event can be found on the WN Conference Abu Dhabi’25 website.

As a reminder, this is WN Media Group's second major event in Abu Dhabi. Exactly a year ago, the inaugural WN Conference Abu Dhabi’24 took place, gathering around 500 guests.