The gaming industry spent 2024 and 2025 obsessing over which jobs AI would eliminate. But the more interesting question — the one with actual strategic implications — is what AI can’t replace. Solomon Ruiz-Lichter figured out the answer three years ago, before the current AI frenzy even started: curated human relationships in a high-trust community.
Solomon is the founder of the Product LiveOps and Growth Symposium, now entering its third year during GDC. What began as a vendor-side experiment has become one of the most sought-after events during GDC week — and its growth trajectory holds lessons that go far beyond event planning.
The core insight: In an AI supercycle where content costs approach zero and noise becomes infinite, the ability to build trusted, curated communities around specific professional audiences is becoming the single most durable competitive advantage in the games business — for operators, service providers, and studios alike.
🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Anchor
Speakers:
Joseph Kim, CEO at Lila Games
Solomon Ruiz-Lichter, Founder at Dual Pulse Advisory
The 10% Gap That Created an Entire Community
The Symposium didn’t start with a budget or a venue. It started with a hypothesis.
Solomon and his co-founder Tim Hong (then at AWS) analyzed the GDC content lineup and found that product management, LiveOps, and growth content accounted for roughly 10% of sessions. This for an operational discipline that directly drives the revenue of every live-service game on the market.
That gap between audience need and content supply created the opening. “The hypothesis was that product leadership, product management, and particularly LiveOps was an underserved audience at not just GDC, but events in general,” Solomon explained. “There just wasn’t a lot of content around it.”
The validation process was straightforward: map the existing content landscape, identify the underserved audience, and build a programming concept around the gap. The first year’s concept — how AI would change games — proved prescient. At the inaugural 2024 Symposium, Travis Oatman from Carbonated was already discussing AI-automated localization, a technique that major publishers only rolled out across their enterprises in 2026.
The lesson for anyone considering building a community event: start with a falsifiable hypothesis about an underserved audience, not with a sponsorship budget.
Year 3: What Breaks and What Holds
This year tested whether the Symposium had built something real or something fragile.
Three things went wrong simultaneously. Tim Hong left AWS mid-planning cycle, creating uncertainty about the anchor sponsor relationship. GDC attendance dropped — particularly from European attendees. And new competitors emerged, running events clearly inspired by the Symposium’s format.
Here’s what happened: the event came together in roughly 21 days of serious execution. Registrations came in strong. Speakers committed quickly. The brand held.
“People were hitting me up about a month out, asking if we were doing the Symposium this year,” Solomon said. “That’s the brand we’ve built.”
The 2026 event expanded to two days for the first time, anchored by prime sponsors Xsolla, AWS, and AppsFlyer, with Travis Oatman delivering the keynote and a full programming slate covering both strategic vision (Day 1) and tactical, actionable content for studio operators (Day 2).
What made this resilience possible wasn’t budget. It was the community’s expectation that the event would exist and deliver value. That expectation — earned over three years of consistently prioritized content over sales pitches — is the actual asset.
The “Don’t Sell” Discipline That Builds Trust
Solomon’s first piece of advice for anyone building a community event is counterintuitive for anyone on the service provider side: don’t sell.
“Everyone says, ‘oh yeah, I know, don’t sell.’ But no — you really have to be aware of it. You have to be very purposeful about it,” he emphasized. The Symposium team enforces this rigorously. When an abstract feels even slightly promotional, someone flags it. The content curation process filters for genuine operator value, not vendor messaging.
This isn’t naive altruism. It’s strategic patience. The buying consideration cycle in enterprise game tech is long. By giving genuine value — connecting operators with actionable insights they can take back to their studios — the Symposium builds the kind of trust that eventually converts to business relationships. But the conversion happens on the community’s timeline, not the vendor’s.
The second discipline: take the time to learn the space deeply before you try to build in it. “If you’re a game tech provider and you think, ‘how hard could it be?’ — hard,” Solomon said. “The gaming industry really resonates with people who took the time to learn the space. You need to earn the right to be out doing things in the market.”
This maps directly to a pattern I’ve observed repeatedly in mobile gaming: the service providers who build lasting businesses are the ones who can speak credibly about product metrics, LiveOps calendars, and monetization design — not just their own tool’s feature set.
Why Community Value Is About to Spike
Here’s where this conversation shifts from event-planning advice to strategic insight.
Investor Chris Camillo — who built a $300 million portfolio from a $20,000 start — recently described the current AI moment as a “supercycle.” His framework for what survives disruption centers on moats. And his top moat? Relationships and trust.
This aligns with a thesis I’ve been developing: as AI drives the cost of content creation toward zero, the signal-to-noise ratio in every professional community degrades. Generic content becomes infinite. Targeted, curated, high-trust content delivered through human relationships becomes scarce.
The math is simple. When anyone can generate a 2,000-word industry analysis in 30 seconds, the analysis itself loses value. What gains value is the curation layer — knowing which analysis matters, who is credible, and which insights are actionable for your specific context. That’s what a well-built community provides.
The Symposium illustrates this at a practical level. Travis Oatman’s keynote isn’t valuable because it’s content about AI in gaming — there are thousands of those pieces. It’s valuable because Travis has been building production AI tooling at Carbonated for three years, he’s far enough ahead that you could spin out three tech companies from what he’s built, and the Symposium audience knows this context because they’ve been tracking his work since the first event.
That depth of context — speaker credibility validated over time within a trusted community — is something no AI-generated content feed can replicate.
The Window Is Open: Why You Should Consider Starting Your Own Event
If the value of curated communities is inflecting upward, the logical next question is: should you build one?
I’ve thrown GDC dinner events for five years running. I paid for a GDC pass for nearly a decade and averaged 1.5 sessions per year before finally stopping. The formal conference content wasn’t where the value was — the value was in the rooms I curated myself. And I’m not alone. The entire GDC week has become a constellation of external events: content symposiums, private dinners, happy hours, and yes, those nightclub events where the music is deafening and nobody can actually talk (skip those).
Here’s my argument for why right now is the moment to start: the attention economy is about to get dramatically worse. AI-generated slop is flooding every digital channel. The cost of producing generic content is approaching zero, which means your audience’s inbox, feed, and search results are about to become significantly noisier. Against that backdrop, the ability to curate a room of 50-200 professionals around a specific, underserved topic isn’t just valuable — it’s becoming rare.
The Symposium’s playbook offers a practical template. Find a connector — someone with a platform and genuine relationships in the space. Solomon initially leveraged my GameMakers audience to accelerate the Symposium’s early traction; today, LinkedIn is full of people in mobile gaming with substantial followings who could serve the same role. Validate a content gap with actual data, the way Solomon and Tim mapped GDC’s session breakdown and found the 10% LiveOps gap. Program ruthlessly around operator value, not sponsor messaging. And start small — Solomon’s first proof of concept was a dinner in Seattle with a featured speaker and a handful of the right people, not a 400-person two-day conference.
One thing Solomon mentioned that I want to underscore: don’t gatekeep. The Symposium deliberately reserves spots for people between gigs, students, and aspiring operators — not just senior executives at potential client studios. That inclusivity isn’t charity. It’s how you build a community with real depth and long-term loyalty, rather than a transactional networking event that dies the moment the sponsor budget disappears.
The window for building these community assets is open right now, while the value of in-person curation is rising and before the landscape gets crowded. Solomon kicked open the doors, and now others are following. That’s the signal, not the noise.
The Renaissance Model for the AI Age
The parallel that keeps coming back to me is the Renaissance workshop model. The artists who produced the greatest work weren’t isolated geniuses. They clustered in specific cities, shared techniques within tight communities, and collectively raised the bar for everyone in their orbit.
In the early days of mobile gaming, the same dynamic played out. The studios that understood incentivized installs on Tapjoy before their competitors had a massive edge. Game of War beat Kingdoms of Camelot not through superior creative vision, but through an information advantage — they studied Chinese monetization techniques (VIP systems, gold banks) and implemented them first, pushing LTV from $8-$10 to $12-$15 and sweeping the market.
That information advantage came from being in the right rooms with the right people. The same dynamic is playing out now with AI. The studios and operators attending events like the Symposium aren’t just networking — they’re building the information networks that will determine who adapts fastest to the AI supercycle and who gets left behind.
Game development itself may be AI-resistant at the creative level. But the competitive landscape around it — who ships faster, who monetizes smarter, who adopts the right tools first — will be won by the people with the best information networks and the highest-trust professional relationships.
Takeaways
Community is a moat, not a marketing channel. The Symposium survived its co-founder leaving the anchor sponsor company, a GDC attendance drop, and new competitors — because the community itself expected and demanded it continue. Build community assets that transcend any single company or sponsor.
Start with an underserved audience, not a budget. The 10% content gap for product and LiveOps at GDC created an opening that no amount of marketing spend could have manufactured. Map the content landscape for your target audience and build where supply is genuinely thin.
The “don’t sell” discipline is a strategic choice, not a moral one. In long buying-cycle industries like game tech, trust built through genuine value delivery compounds over years. Every promotional session you cut from your event is an investment in that compound return.
Information advantage matters more during transitions. Just as early mobile operators won by being first to adopt incentivized installs or Chinese monetization mechanics, the operators who are first to adopt practical AI workflows — learned through trusted community channels — will have disproportionate advantages in the current supercycle.
The window to build community events is open now. The value of in-person curation is rising while the cost of digital content drops to zero. You don’t need a massive budget — you need an underserved audience, a connector with reach, and the discipline to program for operator value over sponsor messaging. Start with a dinner. See what happens.
Curated human networks become more valuable as AI content becomes cheaper. When the cost of generating generic analysis drops to zero, the premium shifts to knowing which insights are credible and actionable. Invest in the communities that provide that curation layer.
