Montreal Tech Watch

As reported by Robert Rocha, there’s a new study by consulting firm Secor Taktik which concludes by stating that Montreal is a mature place for development of video games.

Quebec’s video game industry counts over 6,200 employees.

Texas, British Columbia and Quebec are among the regions that have best positioned themselves, as “mature” regions, getting to a critical mass while experiencing important growing rates. Most of the complex games development – for example, AAA games for consoles – are from these “mature” regions.

2 weeks ago, Investissement Québec also revealed figures for the region of Montréal, with a figure of 4,953 employed in the video games industry in the city. Investissement Québec states that in the span of 2 years, the industry has seen 177% growth in terms of headcount, with new video game firms coming (EA or more recently Eidos or TrapDoor Inc.) or existing firms growing, such as Ubisoft Montreal which is now the biggest employer, with 1,609 employees, a figure set to rise up to 3,000 thanks to growth plans announced earlier this year.

The second biggest video game company is A2M, with 438 employees, and the third one is Electronic Arts, with 330 employees.

Investissement Québec hinted that growth was due to the very aggressive governement incentives, especially at the provincial levels. Other regions, such as British Columbia, Korea, Texas, or Singapore are now using the Québec “model” to bootstrap a local video game development hub.

There are of course other factors, such as Quebec being able to produce video games for different locales, for both Europe and North America, even if this frightens investors at the beginning as they think about cultural barriers and French.

I expect the video games to be a growing industry in Montreal, even with the strong Canadian dollar or even with the weak economic forecasts. Great figures to recall when there’s MIGS and kokormi in town this week.