![]() ![]() It has become a safe space for gaming.ĭisclosure: The organizers of MIGS 2017 paid my way to Montreal. Canada seems further along on the road toward equal treatment of gaming culture. It has no Hollywood, no inferiority complex about the Oscars, and perhaps fewer skeptical aunts, who looks down with upturned noses on gaming culture. But Canada is a safe place for this kind of talk, and I was not at all surprised that the speech found a welcoming audience in Montreal. Rhetorically, Albrecht went on to ask a form of that question over and over, even as he showed images of games that are making a difference, like That Dragon, Cancer, which showed what it’s like when death is inevitable, or Re-Mission 2, which gives kids the will to fight cancer.Īny game developer anywhere could have given that speech. She asked him, “Why aren’t you doing something useful with your life?” He related how his aunt asked him 20 years ago about his job in video games. I was struck most of all by a five-minute speech by Tony Albrecht, a senior engineer at Riot Games. Tanya X Short of Captain Kitfox Games said that games can be made without killing ourselves with too much work. Rebecca Cohen Palacios of Ubisoft spoke on making games for her dad, who is nearly blind, by making the controls more accessible. and Dawson College said there are no easy answers when developers clash about how to make a game, and that it pays to test the character of younger students with no-win situations. Henry Smith of Sleeping Beast Games talked about how he wanted to give away his games for free, but still make a basic living. During this talk, developers discussed how there are no easy answers for the quandaries involved in making games. I’ll write more about that session later. Still, during the closing session of MIGS 2017, I heard a lot about the resilience of game developers. His company is one of the few that has had a game that made more than $1 million, and he talked about his hope that VR arcade games, like his Chaos Jump Squad, could be an alternative source of revenues for VR game developers. Vander Caballero, the CEO of Minority Media, noted that the virtual reality companies are facing a fire-breathing dragon now because sales have been less than expected. ![]() One reason is that PlayStation 4 and Xbox One games are easier to make because they are based on PC technology, Hilchie said.Īnd some companies are in dire straits. Budgets for making games are down, due to efficiencies, and the average size of teams is down. Fourteen percent made PC and Mac games, up 7 percent. ![]() Eighteen percent made console games, up 5 percent. Twenty-nine percent made mobile games, down 36 percent. 50 percent of companies reported they had made at least one process innovation.Ībout 31 percent of the companies made games for the web, up 8 percent. That money has gone into companies that have made games such as We Happy Few and The Darwin Project. The Canada Media Fund has invested $130 million in 300 game companies to date (Studio MDHR didn’t get a grant). The government subsidies are making a difference. ![]() 62 percent of the jobs are at the very large companies. Canadian tax breaks make those jobs even more cost-effective. The average salary is $77,300 in Canadian dollars, up 8 percent and well below comparable salaries in the U.S. And the jobs support another 18,000 indirect jobs. Those companies employ 21,700 people, up 6 percent from 2015. Of those, 228 are micro-companies, 241 are small, 62 are medium, 39 are large, and 26 are very large. Game development contributes $3.7 billion to the gross domestic product in Canada, up 24 percent from $3 billion in 2015. Jayson Hilchie, president and CEO of the Entertainment Software Association of Canada, said in one session that Canada has 596 game companies, based on a 2017 survey, up 21 percent from the previous survey in 2015. ![]()
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