The Armchair Game Designer

Today I take a 4-night trip to Boston, and coupled with an upcoming research paper for my moral issues summer course, I doubt I’ll have a lot of time to blog in the coming days. But I couldn’t go without mentioning some very big local news: Ubisoft, one of the smaller ‘big guns’ of game development and publishing, is opening a massive Toronto studio.

Ubisoft, whose Montreal studio already employs about 1700 people and is responsible for a lot of triple-A titles, plans on hiring about 800 people for its new studio over the next decade. This move marks an important milestone in the Ontario government’s plans to increase high-tech jobs in the province, investing $263 million into the developer over 10 years. In an interview with Gamasutra, Ubisoft Montreal/Toronto CEO Yannis Mallat had this to say on the plan for Toronto:

We don’t want to shoot low; it’s important for the quality of jobs and the quality of the studio to aim as high as we can as a group.

So we want to make triple-A games. It doesn’t exclude the possibility we might make other kinds of games, but we’d want them to be the best and the most successful.

What’s interesting is that Mallat talks a bit about the convergence of the film and video game industry. I’ll be writing a separate post when I return on the benefits and pitfalls of closely associating the two mediums, but it sounds like Ubisoft is really sticking with a cinematically story-driven presentation:

Toronto’s a really interesting city for that because it hosts, for example, the biggest film festival in the world, larger than Cannes. That kind of thing is certainly going to help us gather talent and get a closer relationship to the film industry, because we need to get closer.

We need to learn from them and the things that they do, and when we talk to directors and they see our tools and work they are always surprised about how much closer our industries are than they thought. Making the most of that convergence is important to us and it’s going to create better jobs and ultimately better games.

Mallat ends the interview by praising a number of nearby universities and colleges, and the “brain gain” of hiring both graduates and coaxing former Torontonians back to the city (or the province).

Have I mentioned how exciting it is to live in this country, in this time? Canada- and Ontario in particular- have been aggressively pushing for an increased presence in the worldwide high-tech business. Canada has the third-highest concentration of game developers behind the United States and Japan, impressive when you consider our relative population differences. Yet traditionally, the biggest studios have found homes in other provinces. Quebec has had Ubisoft’s flagship studio for over a decade, Alberta has BioWare, and Vancouver has studios for big names like Rockstar.

Ontario, on the other hand, has traditionally been home to smaller- albeit very successful- developers. In London, you’ll find the headquarters of Digital Extremes (which has partnered with Epic Games on the Unreal series of games since time began, it seems). Closer to home (and I mean that quite literally, with their studios a ten-minute walk away from my doorstep) is Silicon Knights. My municipality put a lot of hope and investment into SK, and for good reason- games like Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem proved to be both critically and commercially successful. It’s a shame that their latest game, Too Human, was marred by its share of pre-release controversy and came out to lackluster reviews and sales.

While I was compiling this list of big-name Canadian developers, I was struck not only by their ubiquity, but also by their high pedigree. These developers have crafted some of the most well-respected games and franchises of the last decade- from Knights of the Old Republic to Unreal Tournament to Splinter Cell. Okay, so Rockstar Vancouver is also responsible for turning Max Payne from a dark, brooding anti-hero in the noir streets of New York into an aging, balding, hefty Brazilian. I guess no track record is perfect.

Ubisoft’s Toronto addition goes to show that the industry places a lot of faith in this country and its ability to produce great game developers. As an aspirant myself, it’s an exciting proposition. The framework is in place, thanks in no small part to the government (never thought I’d say that!) I, for one, have never been more excited.