Gamebryo 2.5 Announcement Event (発表会)

Our Tokyo team deserves HUGE kudos today. They did a FANTASTIC job arranging for a launch event we held in Tokyo today. The "happyokai" (hop-pyo-kai) is a common occurrence here in Japan. It literally means "announcement meeting" and it's advertised as "Hey... we're going to announce something at this meeting."

We rented a theater at the UDX building in Akihabara. Akihabara is Tokyo's electronics district, and every gadget-lovers dream. The happyokai's agenda looked like this:

• I gave short introductory remarks, talking about the company generally, and about our growth in Asia specifically. For example, I explained that we sold our first license in to China in 2005, that we sold more than 15 there in 2007, and that we've sold more than 10 there to date this year.
• Takumi Shimizu, the Business Development (Sales) Director on our Japan team, gave a brief introduction to Gamebryo 2.5.
• Kohei Kamata, the Technical Support lead on our Japan team, gave an Xbox 360 demo of Gamebryo.
  
• Yoshiaki Watanabe, Application Engineer at Avid Japan, gave a presentation and demo of the XSI exporter for Gamebryo. Yeah... we support XSI now!!! :-)
• Valery Carpentier, our Global TAM (Technical Account Manager) gave a demo of our terrain editor.

After the formal presentations in this theater environment, we did a brief Q&A, and also answered questions and showed product demos out in the theater lobby.

Again, hats off to our Tokyo team for organizing and pulling off such a successful event.

Val and DB pointing to the sign advertising our happyokai in the UDX theater.

The greeting table at our happyokai. The young lady, by the way, is a model hired from an agency to be our Master of Ceremonies. Very common in Japan.

Me giving my introductory remarks. We had quite a few press members there; I was blinded by all of the photo flashes as I started speaking.

The theater where our happyokai was held. This shot was taken before people started arriving. The Gamebryo banners at the top were a nice touch, one of our demos is running on screen, and both DB and Val are sitting at the front of the theater working on their PCs.