Roberto Rocha has an article telling Ubisoft’s acquisition of Hybride Technologies, the studio who made the special effects of movie hits 300 or Sin City. The studio’s talent and assets will be used for the production of video games, and also for move tie-ins.

The acquisition comes also in a week where Blizzard and Activitision have merged. Add that to EA’s efforts to buy Take Two Interactive and we’ll have just a couple of behemoths in the industry, maybe just in a few years. I expect cost of production to increase, as titles takes more resources & time; with small video game programmers having to face huge barriers of entry, since they cannot in any way produce the same level of work as a specialized fx studio like Hybride. Those independent programmers will actually have to move to casual gaming, for the web; or produce games for devices like the iPhone.

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).

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

I went last wednesday to GameCamp — mostly because it was the first edition.

This post is not much a report about the presentations, I’ll leave this to the more informed Michel, but more a comparison of the “Web/Entrepreneur” vs “video games” community.

What I’ve seen is the Web people we see in Barcamps and Blitzweekend are much more diverse. You can see for instance in a Barcamp solo entrepreneurs, hardcore programmers, investors, creative people with dreams and big projects, guys who are designer/programmer/marketers at the same time, some who might be in the industry for as long as 1995 or those who just came with a new web idea the day before the meetup.

This is a striking difference compared to video games, which is now an industry in Montréal, with all its consequences. Jason Della Rocca, who was the host for the evening, asked casually what job positions people in the room had, and apparently everyone in the room knew exactly what their speciality were. It occured to me that these kind of questions couldn’t be asked in a BarCamp, as most of us are working on bleeding edge “stuff” that has yet to find a name. Also one revealing difference was that there were many video games sudents in the room, coming from various video games school. Yes, it’s now an industry, and it’s socially acceptable to have a “video games” career, while it’s harder to present yourself as a “web entrepreneur”.

Apart from this, I would say though that both communities are more similar than they are different. Both are obsessed on innovation, both are obsessed on the quality of the people they get to work with, and ultimately both know that it’s ultimately the market that decides wether if you are doing a great product/service or not… and of course, they also know they have to work their *ss off in order to ship a great product.

All in all, this was very insightful. If you are working in video games, I am also inviting you to BarCamps and other related events. I think it will much more fun and insightful — so that both communities benefit from each other’s errors and successes.

Alliance Numérique has inaugurated today their blog section, with 3 authors coming from Alliance Numérique, and a fourth contributor coming from Strataction, a strategy consulting firm.

Alliance Numérique holds an enviable position as the main business network for everyone in the multimedia and video games industry in Quebec. Their new blog section leaves a lot to be desired though, posts are limited to 1 paragraph, there is no RSS to which people can subscribe. I don’t know also if they get the “blog thing” as they don’t take any position or any insight in the posts I found.

Alliance Numérique’s website was relaunched last year, in a rebranding move that I criticized. The blog section was then announced to be opened in early January. Nearly 4 months later, they’ve done it but the new blog section seems only to be a half-hearted project. It occurs me that they did a better job with their portal-like website last year.

Until then, you can follow Michel McBride who blogs about video games here in MTW.

The next meeting of the IGDA’s Montreal Chapter will take place at the SAT on Wednesday, the 26th. With 20 presentations limited to 6 minutes each, I’m expecting it to be a super condensed version of last November’s Montreal International Game Summit. GameCamp, like MIGS, appears to draw on a large spectrum of topics and presenters. Heri pointed out that at least one of the topics appears questionable — and there probably will be a few thinly veiled sales pitches — but I also expect some really informative and entertaining presentations (I’m personally looking forward to Clint Hocking’s “Games and Meaning”).

Click here for more info, including a full list of presenters and presentations.

7pm, Wednesday, March 26
The SAT, 1195 St Laurent
$5 entry fee, at the door

Mark Greenshields has written a brief criticism of the government tax credits used by Quebec (and recently Ontario) to attract developers and foster industry growth. I found it to be an extremely interesting and surprising article, as I had previously never read anything but praise and support for the tax credits offered to companies in Montreal and the rest of the province. His points are honest and hard to argue with, given what I know of the companies that exist in Montreal and the types of games being produced. This is the kind of candor you just won’t find from the CEOs of Ubisoft or EA or Eidos:

“Montreal is not an efficient place to run a video games development business. Personal taxes are high, and a good number of the available staff do not have the required attitude. There are some commercially successful games coming from Montreal studios, but can you show me one that did not cost many millions and require a huge team? Unless you have big pockets you’ll need to spend a lot of money developing your games using bigger teams than are necessary, a situation created partly by the tax credit system and partly by the speed of growth in Montreal.”

Read the full article at Develop: Tax Breaks - Panacea or Pestilence?

Greenshields is one of the founders of Glasgow-based DC Studios. He operated an office in Montreal for several years before closing up shop and deciding to focus solely on racing games with his new company, Firebrand Games. Still based out of Glasgow, Firebrand’s North American office is now located in Florida.

IGDA-Montreal is now making a call for mini-presentations to be given at the upcoming GameCamp on March 26th at the SAT.

The “GameCamp” night is a format inspired by events like BarCamp, 20:20, PechaKucha, FooCamp, etc. GameCamp will feature up to 15 mini 6-minute presentations on a multitude of topics/formats, like:

• rant or rave
• game/tech demo
• learning lecture
• research
• etc…

When? March 26th

Where? SAT

Cost? $5 for non-IGDA members

Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developer’s Association and Montreal resident, was recently honoured with the Ambassador Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards.

The award was given to Jason in recognition of his efforts towards “connecting developers with their peers, promoting professional development and advocating on issues such as quality of life, creative freedoms, workforce diversity and credit standards…”

The script Jason prepared for his acceptance speech can be found on his blog. In it, he tells game developers that they are already ambassadors for games and game culture, and they have a responsibility to make the most of their influence over the medium and millions of people who are touched by it.

It’s interesting to note that Jason Della Rocca was on the Montreal Mirror’s list of Noisemakers for 2007, and this year it was indie developer Phil Fish who was named a 2008 Noisemaker. Both received awards in recognition of their work last Wednesday in San Francisco. I think we should all start paying more attention to what The Mirror has to say about the state of the video game industry.