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)

Good news from Akoha, with Austin Hill announcing 3000 confirmed played missions, in 37 countries in the world, and plans now to expand the community beyond the current beta testers/players. Congratulations to the whole Akoha team, make us proud!

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.

As promised, there’s a new map of Montreal.

These were removed:

• capazoo
• bluestreak tech (it’s a 5-year old company)
• jestai
• simon law
• tarantella (service provider doing pretty much everything)
• radiorfid (unavailable website)
• s2i (same as tarantella)
• jeffery thomas, blue chip services (nothing on website)
• navilon (no website avalaible)
• mp3.net, was announced as “launching imminently” a year ago, nothing new since then
• yulnews (acquired)
• videopresse (ended)
• atria rh (also doing services in industrial, sales, everything)
• double v3 (no website)

These were added:

• trap door inc
• identi.ca which is also the same placeholder for criti.ca, ur1.ca, certifi.ca, domesti.ca
• dailydollardeal
• google montreal
• reasonably smart
• seeyourhotel
• Les Laboratoires foulab
• seeyourhotel
• Brouillette & Partners
• BlueSlice Networks
• Fixion Media
• yourteledoctor
• kotsego
• xtranormal

These were changed:

• brigtspark ventures are now brigthspark
• flow consulting is now FlowVentures

View the new map here.

Companies and places are now listed at the bottom, which is much more practical than the previous map. This was done in collaboration with John Beales, who was tremendously helpful to make this happen. Thanks then to John!

If you want to show the map on your website, you can use the code below, thanks to Jean-François Noel

<iframe width="425" height="350" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="http://jfno.net/mymap/mtwmap.html"></iframe>

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.

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.

SoftImage announced this week that they were acquired by Autodesk for $35 million.

Autodesk is a leading 3D software company, makers of acclaimed 3D modeling packages such as AutoCAD (industrial design, architecture, engineering), 3DS Max (video games, video CG effects), Maya (open architecture, used in video CG).

On the other hand, SoftImage’s leading product is XSI, a popular 3D graphics software mainly used in special effects (for the special effects in Star Wars, Jurrasic Park or more recently creating the environment and lighting in the movie 300). They also have a strong foothold in education.

Autodesk is based in San Rafael, CA, while SoftImage is a Montreal company.

One troubling thing in this acquisition is the price paid by SoftImage. The same company was bought by Microsoft in 1994 for $130 million, then was bought by Avid from Microsoft for $285 million in 1998. The difference makes it look like a firesale price, as if Avid did destroy SoftImage’s value 8 fold in a timelapse of 10 years.

Admittedly, SoftImage had back then a star product, DS, the first and only non-linear video-editing suite. DS and the other video editing software has been Avid’s cash cow for the past 10 years, but they didn’t bring any further innovation. Video professionals know now the rest of the story, with the breakthrough of Apple’s Final Cut. Avid announced DS was not part of the deal, and the sale of SoftImage is a strategic move, with the goal on refocusing on their core business (movie editing). Of course, it also brings them cash in hard times.

One can’t help to imagine what would happen if DS was still in the hands of SoftImage and if they had kept working on it and bringing new innovations. Who knows, maybe it could have been a multi-billion dollar company now.