Enabling the Creative Teams

With a month to the Summit's 9th edition in Vilnius, everything starts to come together – including this year's cover art of the conference, which took us a while to develop.

In the following days, you will see this art in the posts where we announce the sessions; and when you will arrive to Vilnius, you will see it on your attendee bag, on your notebook, on the conference's limited edition pins, and on your hoodie.

Today, I'd like to explain how it came together – and what it represents for us.

From Italian Red to Irish Green

Since the very first edition back in 2015, the Summit in Vilnius is associated with red. Our website is red, our graphical logo is red, our prizes are red... and when we started producing custom cover art for each of the conferences, we also stuck with red for Vilnius 2022 and Vilnius 2023:

For the 2024 edition, though, we yearned for something different: we decided to try to depict the concept of a "metaverse" (a dream of many studios, a reality of just a few), and that concept called for another key color: Irish Green.

Quite confident that we can develop the key art later on, we proceeded to order all the relevant materials – from the paper for the notebooks, to the clothing to be used when stitching custom-made hoodies.

Metaverse?

With the issue of the color settled, we started to develop the actual cover art, and this is where we got stuck: while you can say that Fortnite is an example of a metaverse, it is a much harder ask to go the other way and to try to paint "a metaverse" as a general idea. The more we tried, the less appealing it was turning out:

Geometrical shapes? Planets? Polygons? A digital wolf transitioning into the space of ideas? The more we dug in, the less appealing it looked – very much like what happened to Mark Zuckerberg, who was so excited about something utterly bland.

In the end, we gave up on the metaverse and agreed that we will need something else, preferably as a collaboration with an outside independent artist, for a fresher look.

The Wolf & the Snake

After asking around, we approached the Montréal-based Bandit Bandit Studio, and gave them carte blanche to come up with a new idea, with the limitation that it has to work well against the green (as the supplies started to arrive already) and rely on the Wolf of Vilnius (our main character).

In the brief, we tried to define the key aspect of the Summit's community, thinking back to Bogac EROZAN 's presentation on the identify of the legal teams from 2023, and we distilled it down to the motto of "enabling the creative teams" – defending developers from the externalities, be it burdensome regulation or aggressive competition, and helping them stay focused on the actual production to bring their vision to life.

Bandit Bandit proposed 3 concepts:

• The Fighting Wolf – which we thought is a good choice for the litigators, but too narrow for the other specializations;
• The Wolf Warrior – which we liked as an image of a General Counsel who reports to the CEO and the board, but which was a bit too simplistic for the lawyers who actually do the ground work; and
• The Wolf & the Snake – an idea that we immediately loved, as it represented both the legal work needed to, say, protect your studio from the patent trolls; and the legal work involved in understanding the new regulation on loot boxes, that often comes across as a confusing set of rules.

Bandit Bandit proceeded to develop the wolf and the snake:

Until we settled at a version that worked great everywhere, from digital to printed:

We feel that this image is a good illustration of what we, as a community, aspire to:

• to act as the protector of our creative teams, enabling them to focus on production;
• to deal with threats and risks that often start as something abstract, unclear, hard to define, but carry the potential to poison the business of our studios; and, finally,
• to collaborate as one pack on the issues where our industry faces the common challenges, such as the over-regulation or the encroachment of gambling over the true interactive entertainment content.

We hope that you enjoy this year's art, and we extend our gratitude to this year's sponsors of the conference, whose generous support makes projects like this possible:

We look forward to introducing to you the agenda of the Summit over the next few weeks, and to seeing some of the best legal minds of the international games industry coming together to catch up and debate, here in Vilnius in just a month from now!

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Sergei Klimov @ CO