By Joel Smart (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: August 21, 2012
For a long time Vancouver was heralded as a major player in the mainstream gaming industry. All of the companies behind the biggest games had studios here, including Electonic Arts, United Front Games, Propaganda Games, Relic Entertainment, Ubisoft, Radical Entertainment and Rockstar Vancouver. These Vancouver studios have created some of the biggest games around, from EA’s Need For Speed and NHL games to Rockstar’s cult classic Bully; Radical’s Prototype series and United Front’s recent hit Sleeping Dogs (and upcoming LittleBigPlanet Karting) are also made here. Yet, despite the hotbed of talented artists, designers and programmers in the area, many game companies are packing up and leaving. Unless something changes fast, Montreal and Toronto may be the only Canadian gaming hotspots left.
“Back in the glory days of gaming, Vancouver was Canada’s ‘it town’ where things were happening,” 15-year industry veteran Shane Neville told gaming business website Gamasutra last week. “…things are going the other way now.”
On July 26, Microsoft ended development on Microsoft Flight and laid off an undisclosed number of employees from their Vancouver studio. It signals the continuing trend that has everyone in the Vancouver game industry on edge this year. Gamasutra has captured the 2012 Vancouver collapse in a number of reports and columns, and the details are not pretty. What began in January, when Ubisoft shut down its Vancouver studio, continued on through the year, when in March, massive layoffs left only 39 employees at Relic Entertainment. Things only got worse as summer approached. In June, Resident Evil developer Slant Six laid off a quarter of their workers. The month also saw Radical all but shut down after parent company Activision fired almost all of the staff – leaving a few to “support other existing Activision Publishing projects” according to the official press statement. In early July things took another turn for the worse, when Take Two Interactive dissolved Rockstar Vancouver, and offered all employees a position at their Rockstar Toronto studio. Dead Rising 2 developer Capcom Vancouver also revealed, on July 18, that they would be letting a significant number of employees go. In just a few short months, a thriving industry was struggling to keep afloat.
At the expense of oversimplifying the issue, the actions of Ontario are majorly to blame for Vancouver’s troubles. They’ve essentially bought their way into the industry by offering major tax rebates to game makers who develop in their province. As a result, studios setting up in Toronto can make games cheaper than those in Vancouver. It’s a move that hurts the Canadian economy as a whole, but it does help Ontario.
Adding to the problem, however, is Vancouver’s high cost of living. High prices in real estate mean that everything costs more money, and that means employers have to pay people more as well. One developer told Canadian Business that making a game in Vancouver is about 40 per cent more expensive than making the same game in Quebec would be. When budgets for games are in the millions of dollars, it’s easy to see why companies are jumping ship.
While BC politicians will need to make changes quickly to keep the market competitive if Vancouver is going to have any hope of recovering, doing so could start a bidding war between provinces. Instead, it may be time for smaller, indie studios to rule – focusing on the mobile market, Facebook games and PSN/XBLA/Steam games. These less risky ventures can still operate in the current economic climate. For Vancouver, at least, the era of the blockbuster may be forever at an end.
