Norwegian based game publisher/developer Funcom is the latest multinational corporation to take advantage of the tax credits and other provincial government incentives offered to game companies setting up shop in Quebec. Their new Montreal studio was created with help from Investissement Quebec and, according to the CBC, is expected to create 100-150 new jobs in the next 18 months. There are not yet any Montreal specific job postings on Funcom’s website.

Funcom are perhaps best known for their MMORPGs Age of Conan and Anarchy Online. They are currently working on an expansion for Age of Conan and a brand new MMO called The Secret World. Their press release states that this new studio will be involved with both of these projects.

(Via Gamasutra)

Gamasutra and GameDaily BIZ are reporting that Edmonton-based BioWare is expanding to Montreal. BioWare is best known for their wildly successful roleplaying games, such as Baldur’s Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Mass Effect. Last year the company was acquired by Electronic Arts.

This new BioWare Montreal team will consist of approximately 30 people, with half of those being brought in from Edmonton. They will be supporting the Edmonton studio in development of Mass Effect 2, due for release in early 2010. There are already a few job postings on BioWare’s Montreal jobs page, with more likely to follow in the coming weeks and months.

Barring any further global financial disasters, I fully expect this ‘expeditionary force’ to eventually grow into a full-fledged studio, working on its own games independent of both EA and BioWare Edmonton. For the time being, however, they are taking a very cautious and thrifty approach, by starting small and moving into EA Montreal’s offices to take advantage of their existing infrastructure.

I don’t expect many MTW readers to choose this event over StartupDrinks, but for anyone who might be interested, this Wednesday at 7pm the IGDA and SAT (1195 St-Laurent) will be hosting Clint Hocking, Creative Director at Ubisoft. Admission is $5 at the door.

The talk he’ll be giving is titled “The Next Generation Player”, and is likely a slightly more polished version of the one he gave at the Game Design Expo in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago (techvibes has a summary). We can expect him to use numerous statistics and some informed prediction to take a look at how the next big change in games won’t necessarily be coming from new technology, but rather the demographic shift, as Generation Y replaces X in terms of both players and the creative leaders within the games industry. One thing to keep in mind is Hocking’s focus has always been the hardcore gamer, so he probably won’t even touch on the truly “next-gen” types of players — those people who play ARGs and games like Akoha.

Those interested can head over to the Montreal IGDA website for more detailed information, everyone else: Have fun at StartupDrinks!

Esteemed game industry web-magazine Gamasutra has named Ubisoft Montreal as one of its top 5 game developers of 2008. They share the recognition with Valve (Left4Dead, Portal), Bethesda (Fallout 3), MediaMolecule (LittleBigPlanet), and “independant game developers”. Reviews and opinions for Ubisoft’s recently released Prince of Persia and Far Cry 2 have been mixed, but, as Gamasutra explains, sometimes innovation is more important than high Metacritic scores:

“Employees of Ubisoft Montreal have become known for espousing the belief that it is important to attempt new types of gameplay and design systems, even if they aren’t executed perfectly the first time out — an unusual ethic for such a major division of a large, mainstream publisher.”

Two of these Ubisoft Montreal employees worth knowing by name are Clint Hocking and Ben Mattes. Clint was the Creative Director on Far Cry 2, and is known for often criticizing the current poor state of game design while defending (and helping to shape!) its future potential and legitimacy as an art form. His blog, Click Nothing (probably the cleverest blog title I’ve ever seen), has been silent for the past few months as Far Cry 2 neared release, but now that he’s back from vacation regular updates have started appearing again. His response to Roger Ebert’s assertion that games cannot be art is required reading for anyone who has ever played a video game.

Ben Mattes was the producer on the new Prince of Persia, and also keeps an interesting blog called Too Much Imagination. The past several posts directly deal with PoP and provide insight into the sometimes unusual and risky design decisions that are the reason Gamasutra and everyone else in the industry counts Ubisoft Montreal as one of the best and most forward-thinking studios in the world.

Leigh Alexander has written an excellent article exposing the disturbing actions and beliefs of Eidos Montreal’s former HR director (currently employed at Ubisoft):

“…a correspondence obtained by Gamasutra suggests that some Montreal-based companies may be attempting to collude on salary caps, under the auspices of benefiting the economics of the industry in a given region – and at the expense of competitive wages for development staff.

According to a scan of an internal email that we translated from French, human resources director Flavie Tremblay — when employed by Eidos in June 2007 — reached out to fellow Montreal publisher Ubisoft to propose just such a collaboration.”

Read the rest of the article at Gamasutra: In-Depth: Montreal Game Biz Sees Salary-Fixing Collusion?

Ubisoft needs to offer a better response than “rumour and speculation.” The message they’re currently sending by continuing to employ someone like this as their Human Resources manager is “we don’t respect or value our current and future employees.”

The Montreal International Game Summit will be taking place this week, with hundreds of game designers, programmers, artists, executives, and academics descending on the Palais des Congrès (map) from around the world to share ideas and techniques. What’s exciting about the conference this year is that you don’t have to be an industry professional to attend some of the events.

This Wednesday, November 19, from 3pm to 7pm, the exhibition hall will be open to the public. Last year’s exhibition hall featured booths from companies such as Nintendo, Ubisoft, and Eidos. If you’re a student looking for a job at game development studio in Montreal, you’ll find the networking opportunities invaluable.

At 5:15pm Jonathan Blow’s closing keynote will also be open to the public. I would suggest reading about his keynote at last year’s MIGS before deciding if it’s something you’d consider leaving work early for. This year’s talk is titled “A fundamental conflict in contemporary game design” and promises to be just as searing a criticism of current game design practices as his last one was.

And then at 9pm the doors of the SAT (map) will open for experimental design group Kokoromi’s GAMMA 3D. $5 at the door will get you admission and a pair of 3D glasses. Several experimental stereoscopic, or 3D-glasses-required, games were created for this event, but with the caveat that the pop-out 3D elements had to impact the gameplay in some way and not just be eye candy. The most unique games you’ve probably ever played, everyone in stereoscopic glasses, and beer. I’ll see you there.

You can read more about Kokoromi and GAMMA 3D in an article in this week’s Mirror, also available online.

Eidos Montreal is currently looking to fill several new job openings as they prepare to form the second of three planned development teams. These openings range from Senior Network Programmer to Technical Librarian/Intraweb Support, with an emphasis on senior and artistic positions. If working in the game industry is something that appeals to you or someone you know then this is an excellent and rare opportunity. It’s not often that a studio creates a development team from scratch. The full list of job openings and descriptions have been posted on eidosmontreal.com, along with all the necessary information for applying.

It was announced last year that Deus Ex 3 would be the first game to be developed by this new Montreal studio. The original Deus Ex, released for PC in 2000, is a critically acclaimed classic with a strong following among gamers and developers. It was fairly obvious at the time that a large part of the reason the Deus Ex IP was chosen for this new studio was to attract talent that simply wasn’t available in Quebec or Montreal.

The second game, to be developed by the team they are in the process of hiring, has not been officially announced yet, but some hints previously appearing on the Eidos Montreal website have basically confirmed that it will be Thief 4. The Thief series began on the PC in 1998, and, like Deus Ex, is an extremely popular IP that can be used to attract developers from around the world (or competing neighbours like EA and Ubisoft).

Last month Ubisoft revealed that their upcoming Montreal-developed Nintendo DS title My Health Coach: Weight Management would ship with a pedometer peripheral that tracks a user’s steps and distance travelled. This pedometer can be carried around during the day, and uploads stats and progress to the application when attached to the DS. What differentiates this title from the multitude of other non-games for the DS, and even WiiFit, is the mobility of the peripheral and potential applications for use outside of weight management.

On the very same day Ubisoft announced My Health Coach, noted Alternate Reality Game designer Jane McGonigal gave a talk at SXSW on and happiness and why and how we should be making real life more like video games. Her full keynote can be read here. With Ubisoft’s DS pedometer fresh on my mind, I couldn’t help but feel her ideal future where society uses games in their daily lives to kill boredom was closer than she thought. Near the end she talks about expensive GPS utilities tracking positions and mobile devices that communicate with Twitter and other web services, but here comes Ubisoft with an affordable peripheral for the most popular mobile device on the planet. I’m sure a designer like Jane McGonigal could come up with dozens of bredom-killing game ideas that take advantage of this pedometer. And how long can it be until the DS officially supports GPS tracking too? It’s refreshing to see that Ubisoft Montreal isn’t a studio just limited to creating big budget blockbusters, and is actually at the forefront of challenging our concept of what constitutes games and where they can be played.

In this article posted on the IGDA Montreal blog, Pierre Boudreau provides us with brief summaries of each of GameCamp’s 20 mini-presentations. It’s no substitute for attending the actual six minute talks, but is nonetheless a nice overview that shows those of us who were unable to attend what kind of event GameCamp is and what can be expected from the next one.

Interfaces Montreal has generously uploaded videos of the five speakers who presented at the demo-conference that took place two weeks ago. Each presentation lasts around 15-20 minutes, so you might want to first read Bart Simon’s write-up of the event before deciding which videos are worth committing the time to watching.

Simon’s own talk was fascinating, and probably the only one I would recommend watching in its entirety. He summarizes the ideas behind his research on the “physicality of Wii play,” or the Wii’s ability to shift the nature of video game boundaries in the living room. For such a potentially esoteric topic he was incredibly concise and clear. His side-by-side comparisons of advertisements for the PlayStation 3 and Wii were particularly effective at conveying the essence of his research — that the Wii has brought play into the physical space of the living room, and the players and space they occupy are beginning to become as much a part of the game experience as what occurs inside the television screen.

I have a couple of other general comments to add to Simon’s:

- The Army of Two co-op presentation was, as I had feared, not much more than an extended preview of the game (with no less than 6 gameplay trailers!).

- Phil Fish continues his impassioned crusade against the mainstream game industry and I have to ask: Why? I agree that there is incredible innovation and artistic style and opportunity for those choosing to follow the indie game aesthetic, but it’s also an aesthetic that easily promotes formulaic gameplay and ugly art. Both mainstream and indie games have their unique advantages and disadvantages and that seems like something Fish should have acknowledged. It’s unfair to judge AAA studios like Ubisoft so harshly when there has never been an indie action game with a world as vibrant or open as the one in Assassin’s Creed, for example.

The fourth Interfaces Montréal demo-conference of 2008, New Frontiers in Gaming, will be held next Tuesday, April 8th, at the SAT. The theme of the conference appears to be an exploration of the new platforms and gameplay that are changing the way we interact with and experience video games.

Since it is a “demo-conference” it makes sense for the speakers to use their own games for demonstrative purposes, but I hope that doesn’t limit the scope of their talks. For example, Reid Schneider, Senior Producer at EA, will be speaking about co-operative play in the company’s upcoming game Army of Two. I don’t expect, however, that he will talk about how Rock Band/Guitar Hero has changed the nature of co-operative gaming, or attempt to explain how the very interesting and recent idea of shared singleplayer gaming fits into our traditional perception of co-op.

In any case, it should be an interesting night with some insight into the ideas behind the latest games coming out of Montreal studios. If that kind of thing doesn’t interest you then you still might want to consider attending for Bart Simon’s more academically focused talk titled “The Material Imaginary of the Wii: Bodies, Spaces and the not-at-all Virtually Real.”

A full list of speakers and more information can, as usual, be found on the Interfaces Montréal website. Tickets are $15 if bought in advance or $20 at the door. $10 for students.

Tuesday, April 8th
5:30PM-9:30PM
SAT – 1195 Saint-Laurent boulevard