Industry committee  Good afternoon. I am Vice-President of Frima Studio, a business in Quebec City which started up with video games. Frima has 350 employees and is the largest independent video game design studio in Canada. The business extended the scope of its activities by moving on to animation

Industry committee  At first we started doing servicing. That servicing helped us gain some expertise in programming and animation. We do 2-D and 3-D animation. We create our own technology. We have our own game engines—that's what they're called—so our technology is adapted to many types of game mo

Industry committee  They go to the Apple store.

Industry committee  They go to the Google store. One of the keys things—and it's happening right now to one of our brands for preschoolers, CosmoCamp. You want to be featured as one of the top 10 games. If you manage to convince them to feature you, then people will see you when they go to the game,

Industry committee  We have engines for mobile games. Then we'll program.

Industry committee  We call it porting. We port a game from a platform to another. We have another engine that will use the code and change or transform the code into that other platform. As well, we need communication capabilities, because we want them to communicate, but sometimes the game will b

Industry committee  You progress. You always have a choice. Most games will have the same system. You can play if you want—some games will let you play—but it will take you so long that you'd rather take a power-up, as we call it, so that you'll be stronger and you'll save time. That's very importa

Industry committee  Yes.

Industry committee  Yes, that's what it is. In other games, you'll be able to play the first six levels. If you want to play the whole game, you'll need to unlock the other levels and you'll have to pay for that. There are many models like that.

Industry committee  I can tell you that this was a key point in our development. Most people probably know Club Penguin, which was conceived by some Vancouver residents and purchased by Disney. Webkinz was a Toronto creation. We created GalaXseeds for Corus Entertainment in Toronto. There was a poi

Industry committee  Yes, certain plans that were in the works could not be brought to fruition, but we continue to do a lot of R&D despite that. We have a 30-person team that works on that. That represents almost 10% of our workforce. However, we could possibly do more.

Industry committee  We're increasingly competing, strangely, with database companies, major consultants like CGI, or firms like that. They're after increasingly the same data managers as we are. These people are becoming increasingly rare. It's important to promote those jobs because there's actual

Industry committee  In Quebec City it's about 1,500, and Montreal is about 10,000 and something. Montreal is the biggest one. There may be 15,000 in Montreal. If you count interactive things, not just games but websites and everything, it's much bigger than that. Sometimes we hire the same people, t

Industry committee  Jobs, yes.

Industry committee  I think the day we have our own brands, we won't need as many subsidies. Garfield doesn't need subsidies. Mickey Mouse doesn't need subsidies. We need to create our own Canadian brands. Another point is, I think that if the government does that, at least from what I know in Queb