Evidence of meeting #43 for Canadian Heritage in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was games.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Communications Director, Ubisoft Entertainment Inc.
I prefer to deal with a woman if she's very talented.
NDP
Rathika Sitsabaiesan NDP Scarborough—Rouge River, ON
Thank you all for being here with us.
I'm going to ask questions in a slightly different vein.
Mr. Iwaniuk, when you were speaking about the development phase of a game, you mentioned that 70% of the work is really done by artists, not programmers.
My question is for all of you. Could you please explain the life cycle of a game being developed? How many people would be involved and how many processes would it go through from conception until it reaches the consumer?
Senior Director, Business Planning and Development, BioWare ULC
BioWare makes role-playing games. It's going to be slightly different, depending on the genre.
From our perspective, a game development life cycle typically takes three years. It could be as short as two years if we're benchmarking off existing technologies. It could be as long as four years, maybe even five years, if we're building a new franchise, a new IP, from the ground up. But on average, two and a half to three and a half years is typically the timeframe.
We start with a fairly small team. They're typically content creators. They're the ones who are laying out the general design of the game, what they want the game mechanics to be, where in the world it wants to be. That's more on the creative aspect of it. We do that phase. Then we'll move into a prototype phase, where we will start to think about the features we want to have in the game and then start to test them. That's proof of concept. That's where technology starts to kick in for us.
NDP
Rathika Sitsabaiesan NDP Scarborough—Rouge River, ON
The concept phase includes writers and screenwriters or artists, that kind of—
Senior Director, Business Planning and Development, BioWare ULC
Yes. It's artists, animators, writers, designers, and usually the executive producers. The senior leadership team of the particular project does the brainstorming.
We'll do some prototyping. We will figure out which features we think we can accomplish and set out points of innovation that we want for the game. Once we do what we call a vertical slice, which essentially is taking a vertical of the gameplay—it's a proof of concept, for all intents and purposes—and the tools are ready to start taking content into the game engine, then we move into production. Production will typically take 12 to 18 months, depending on the size of the game.
NDP
Rathika Sitsabaiesan NDP Scarborough—Rouge River, ON
How many and what types of employees are you using at this point?
Senior Director, Business Planning and Development, BioWare ULC
When we are in full production, that's where we start to get teams in the range of 150 to 200 people. Again, depending on whether it's new engine technology or something that we're benchmarking on, the programming aspect of it might use 50 to 70 people. The rest of them are content creators. They're the artists, animators, writers, designers—the level designers—and the cinematics.
Because our games are story driven, we have an awful lot of cinematic animators and designers who are part of our team, which is something that's different from a lot of the other genres.
NDP
Rathika Sitsabaiesan NDP Scarborough—Rouge River, ON
Do the other two witnesses want to add something, or is it basically the same?
Communications Director, Ubisoft Entertainment Inc.
Except for the tiny details, it's pretty much the same.
Vice-President and Studio Head, Warner Brothers Games Montréal
It's a fairly classic sort of bell curve, as far as the number of people working on it. We start with a small core team, where all sorts of design, art, and technology are involved, and then that core team goes through its proof of concept. Then it's approved and we ramp up. We have lots of people working and producing at all the levels of the game, and then it ramps down.
A big part of it is also quality assurance, people testing the game, which is actually a great way to enter the industry. Testers get to play the game over and over again. That's work, by the way; it's not just fun and games. That tapers off and we either ship the game or we launch it, if it's an online game.
NDP
Rathika Sitsabaiesan NDP Scarborough—Rouge River, ON
Every game you're developing involves a minimum of 300 pairs of hands—300 people, at least. Once it gets beyond the initial process of the creative element, the creative thinking of the actual game and the concept behind it, does product development involve teams of a couple hundred people?
Vice-President and Studio Head, Warner Brothers Games Montréal
It depends. Some of the games we're working on are smaller online games, so maybe that team will go up to 40, and you often have the same ratio of 1:1, as far as a tester is concerned.
Communications Director, Ubisoft Entertainment Inc.
I was a producer before and I produced an iPad game, for example, with 14 people. So it's—
Communications Director, Ubisoft Entertainment Inc.
But we have a team of 400.
NDP
Rathika Sitsabaiesan NDP Scarborough—Rouge River, ON
It's the large market ones that are going with the huge teams like that.
Senior Director, Business Planning and Development, BioWare ULC
When you think about all the actors who get involved, the localization, translation, worldwide QA, certification processes for getting the game so they can serve on platforms, it's well over 600 hands of different people who touch those games.
NDP
Conservative
Terence Young Conservative Oakville, ON
Thank you, Chair.
Somebody told me recently that the need for data in the network in Canada—data messaging through hand-helds and everything—is going to increase 16 times in the next five years. I assume a lot of that is driven by your industry.
We were talking about how many hands might touch a project, but if you take the spinoffs that your industry is driving, it's a huge telecommunications industry. There are six companies in the GTA that are building networks for data transmission.
I was just going through the jobs: artists, animators, musicians, actors, and you need accountants, cinematics, marketers.
Mr. Iwaniuk and Mr. Carrier, briefly, how do you hire writers, or are they already in your organization, and how many would work on a story? I'm curious.
Senior Director, Business Planning and Development, BioWare ULC
Our games are very writer intensive, so we usually have a lead writer and probably anywhere from 5 to 15 additional writers who write content for the game.
Our games are 50,000 to 70,000 lines and upwards of a million words.
Conservative
Terence Young Conservative Oakville, ON
What about actors? You can tell that some of the voices are synthesized, but some of them are real people's voices.
Do you hire actors, and how many might you hire for a project?
I will ask you both to answer.
Vice-President and Studio Head, Warner Brothers Games Montréal
Obviously, we hire a lot of actors. It's a little different for Warner Brothers because a lot of the characters we use have their own set voices. With Bugs Bunny, I can't always—
Vice-President and Studio Head, Warner Brothers Games Montréal
Exactly. We kind of revive him for a weekend.
Sometimes we use tracks when we know exactly where the dialogue will go. We use the local talent unions. The UDA in Montreal, for example, will give us local voice talent that we can use.
Conservative
