Layer AI co-founder and chief revenue office Burcu Ozcengiz has spent the past 10 years working in ad-tech and games, serving companies across the globe, ranging from small indies to the world’s top production powerhouses.
Leaving Unity after an amazing six year long ride and working across many divisions in London and San Francisco, I co-founded Layer AI where I’m responsible for everything about our users.
Layer is a creator-first, enterprise grade productivity tool which aims to accelerate and unlock a tea,#s creative potential.
Ozcengiz is one of more than 250+ expert speakers delivering 29 conference tracks at Pocket Gamer Connects London on January 22nd to 23rd. We asked Ozcengiz to tell us more about their upcoming panel, entitled 'Changing the Game: How AI Will Shake up Game Development (or not)', as well as get their opinions on the latest industry trends.
PocketGamer.biz: Please give us a summary of what you’re speaking about and why it’s important.
Burcu Ozcengiz: I’ll be joining the panel “Changing the Game: How AI Will Shake up Game Development (or not)” and am excited to share my perspective on how it’s possible to use AI to produce game art faster while staying human.
What’s the most common mistake you see being made in the games sector?
Having worked in games tech for most of my career, and knowing the audience, I see a big mistake being repeated amongst the tool providers who want to serve the games industry.
Many of them either highlight the ‘cool’ factor - as seen in AI most recently, people's feeds are bombarded by the cool AI generated images that don’t mean anything to someone who is looking to improve their workflows and looking for a way.
Or, they impose the tech so much - as we've seen with web3, with blockchain startups trying to force gamers to adopt mechanisms that are complicated and simply didn’t make life better - instead of focusing on driving actual value to the end user.
At Layer, I always tell our team that anything which touches an artist's brush and workflow is our priority, it’s as simple as that.
If you could give other mobile games companies one piece of advice, what would it be?
As a friend to many game creators, I recommend being open to test all the tools, to get a sense of where things are, then meeting the team and understanding their vision.
Do they respect artists so that they can respect yours? Do they treat your data carefully and have the right systems in place? Do they understand your art and production challenges?
Once you’re comfortable with these three things, you should be able to make a decision and go with it.
What’s the most important key performance indicator (KPI) for you - and why?
At this stage of Layer, it’s been about eight to nine months, we are counting each happy game art team who confirms they can deliver art faster and create with augmented abilities.
We work with around 40 or so games teams and we hope to contribute to the productivity of all teams working in the art production pipeline one day.
When not making/selling/playing games, what do you do to relax?
Hot yoga, reading, walks, long deep life chats with friends.
What do you enjoy most about working in the mobile games industry?
Working with people. Gaming has the best group of people. It has been and will always be a pleasure serving this industry.
Can people get in touch with you at the event? What sort of people would you like to connect with?
All game companies working on their games, whether in soft launch or live, are welcome to reach out to us via email at info@layer.ai or join us at our speaking sessions - which include both the aforementioned panel and the fireside chat between my amazing co-founder and CEO Volkan Gurel and Tripledot’s VP of Creative, Andriy Matviychuk.
Tripledot has been the very first customer who adopted Layer and 3x'd their art production speed using Layer across many of their games, with many different use cases ranging from game art to marketing and monetisation art.
It’s a truly special moment to have them on stage with us with a goal to help others find value in their creative journey.
Meet Burcu Ozcengiz at PG Connects London
Not only will you have the chance to see Ozcengiz take part as a speaker at the show, but you can also arrange to meet them at PG Connects London. Our online organiser MeetToMatch is free to all event attendees, connecting you directly with more than 2,500 decision makers from the global games industry.
As well as the 29-track conference schedule, the two-day event also features a series of side-events like The Very Big Indie Pitch, Publisher SpeedMatch, Investor Connector and a host of other networking opportunities all aimed at helping you level up your skills and business.
