Sam has spent his entire career leading teams and companies at the cutting edge of the video games industry.
As CEO of Funtactix, Sam managed a team that would become the leading independent game publisher in Hollywood. Under his leadership, the company worked with film directors and authors to create award-winning mobile games for tens of millions of players based on popular films, including The Hunger Games and Mission: Impossible. Funtactix was acquired by Playtech (PTEC) in 2016. The Funtactix management team took on leading roles within Playtech Casual Games.
Earlier in his career, Sam lead the DirectX team at Microsoft and was responsible for pushing the visual limits of video games across the industry. As a result of his team’s work at Microsoft, Sam accepted a Technical Emmy for their contribution to the state of the art in interactive entertainment. Sam established his roots at LucasArts working on cutting-edge games for Star Wars films.
Over the last decade, Sam has leveraged his engineering expertise and gaming roots to pioneer the creation of award-winning medical simulations. These training tools attracted hundreds of thousands of users and garnered support from top academic hospitals. It was this unanticipated success that served as the inspiration for Sam to establish Level EX – a technology company that is unleashing the latest visual effects from the gaming and entertainment industry into the field of medicine.
Sam’s name is featured on a several technology patents, popular video game titles, and he has been the recipient of numerous industry awards. He currently sits on major video game and technology advisory boards.
Quiv:
"Sam,
You are a successful entrepreneur building various gaming platforms.
Can you provide some tips as to what the gamer of 2017 is looking for and how to best serve them?
I'm mostly interested in your thoughts on what's coming next for casual games.
Thank you,
Erez"
Answer:
"Thanks for the kind words :)
There are a billion casual gamers out there - unlike the 90's and early 2000's, they no longer fall into a neat persona anymore.
Everyone plays casual games - kids, adults, hardcore gamers...
General trends follow cycles that we have seen across every maturing game platform - increased production value, increasing success of IP-based games and sequelization.
In the short term, I'm interested to see how messenger integration into games results in new mechanics and distribution channels.
I'm hopeful that the initial fanfare around "pokemon go" will translate into an ecosystem of casual geolocation-based games with deeper gameplay and more diverse mechanics. Anything to get the kids off the couch.
In the medium-term, we can expect that broad adoption of AR technologies like magic leap are going to open up to exciting new genres of casual games. It will be a much longer adoption curve for VR technologies by the mainstream. AR will be much quicker, as the mainstream applications are broader and usability issues fewer.
Glad to provide more detail on any specific area of casual gaming."
Feedback "Thank you Sam!"
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