At the DevGamm Lisbon 2025 opening, the 2026 event timeline was revealed, with Dubai in Spring and foggy Gdansk in Summer. The keynote was held by Chris Charla of Xbox about tips to reach more players in the ecosystem.
This years DevGamm Lisbon, the third one overall, has several premieres in store. For one, it is the first DevGamm Lisbon that does not take place in Lisbon outskirts Cascais, but inside the main city at Myriad Hotel, conveniently next to the location of Websummit. For another, it was precedented by the first Madeira Games Summit, a game management luxury meeting by eGames Lab Madeira and DevGamm.
In her opening remarks, DevGamm CEO Maria Chyrvona shared some numbers for the DevGamm Lisbon 2025 edition. The attendant count has reached more than 1000 people, of which 32 percent are female. Attendees come from 47 countries. Chyrvona also shared the timeline for the coming year of DevGamm, with the new DevGamm Dubai edition in Spring 2026, Gdansk in Summer and Lisbon in Fall. As Chyrvona had shared in our interview in Spring 2024, the DevGamm brand is ever experimenting, and the addition of Dubai, instead of the Vilnius summer fest before, is part of that. DevGamm is also looking to expand further.
After the short introduction, Jefferson Valadares, President of Portuguese game developer association APVP, took to the stage with a short introduction of the Portuguese gaming market.
Followed by this, the keynote of DevGamm Lisbon took place, held by Chris Charla, General Manager for Portfolio and Programs at Xbox. He spoke on maximising worldwide reach on Xbox, including remarks on cloud gaming on any platform without development effort for developers that have an Xbox or PC version. He also introduced the Microsoft Partner Center, tips on features to implement that increase player engagement on Xbox, like unified entitlement and cross-progression and the the Xbox Play Anywhere concept. Charla put a special focus on the Handheld Compatibility program in the wake of the Xbox ROG Ally, and took time to explain things to think about when developing for handheld like text size or symbols for buttons. He rounded out the talk with a cheeky section about seven ways to doom your launch on xbox and any platform, like to use machine translation for localising store texts, bad game cover pictures or slow-starting trailers.
DevGamm Lisbon runs today and tomorrow at the Myriad Hotel Lisbon. Highlights include the traditional public pitch with Rami Ismail on Thursday evening, the DevGamm party afterwards and the DevGamm Awards of Friday afternoon.
