Montreal Tech Watch

Company: EA Montreal Position: Web Producer: High-profile Virtual World Project Responsibilites and Tasks: EA is looking for a great Web Producer / Development Manager to work on a high-profile virtual world for kids, based on an incredibly popular consumer brand. Job description: • Maintain digital product catalog for subscriptions and microtransactions. • Generate, track and [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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”, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]