Canadian Heritage Committee on Oct. 25th, 2012

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Okay, that was my question. It sounds to me like you really didn't have a choice. How does government policy aid you in educating people for this particular industry?

[Luc Duchaine]

We entered into some deal at the time with the Quebec government to help educate people. Montreal has really boomed in the past 15 years. When we arrived in 1997 there were maybe one or two other developers in Montreal and through talent, government aid, and maybe a bit of luck, in Montreal we now have a real ecosystem of video games. We were there, and Electronic Arts arrived in 2002 or 2003, I think. Then Warner came and THQ, then Square Enix, Eidos. All the big guys were coming to Montreal.

We're not only competing locally for talent, because I know a bunch of guys working with Warner's and we have guys jumping from one ship to another. We worked together before. We know each other pretty well. We have guys jumping ship every week. Some come back and some go elsewhere. We had no choice but to create this education program to make sure that.... And some of them went to work elsewhere, not at Ubisoft. They didn't have a job guarantee when they finished.

That's why we created those four new programs from 12 to 25 to get them interested in video games. In the 1980s when I was a teenager, working in video games was not an option. My brother always told me to stop playing video games, where would that take me? It took me around the world. It was a pretty good bet to keep playing video games.

To come back to the artistic side, we have some world-class artists and world-class animators working on our games to make our characters move smoothly. In terms of artists, we have guys doing books. I know one artist who when he wants to go on vacation just does some art and sells it to a book company. He gets a couple of thousand dollars and he goes on vacation with his family. The art aspect is important.

I've been in the business 16 years now and I still have to convince my family I'm not another programmer.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Do you attend conferences—film conferences, writing conferences, that sort of thing—more into the mainstream for artistry, like writing, graphic arts, graphic design, and that sort of thing? That's the first part.

The second part is, do you avail yourself of any programs from, say, the National Film Board, Telefilm, or anything to do with the Canada media fund?

[Luc Duchaine]

None that I'm aware of for the National FIlm Board because we don't do film per se, we do video games. We do attend a bunch of conferences on art and writing. Two years ago I was at the Toronto International Film Festival. We did a panel with Jon Landau, the Avatar producer, and people from the gaming industry in Toronto. We try to be as visible as possible. We've been to Sundance. We try to be everywhere to make our industry known and to get some writers to work for us, or some other people. The narrative aspect is so important, so yes, we need to attend those.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Sorry, I don't have much time left and I'd ask all of you to answer this question, but do you deal with the Department of Canadian Heritage on anything?

[Luc Duchaine]

Not that I'm aware of.

[Richard Iwaniuk]

We did. BioWare's been acquired twice. In 2005 we were acquired, and we had conversations with Canadian Heritage back then. That was—

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

On the acquisition.

[Richard Iwaniuk]

On the acquisition front, yes.

[Martin Carrier]

Warner Brothers is not directly in the games business, certainly, but one thing I'd like to note is you talked about the Canada media fund and that's been great in supporting smaller companies than us, that are starting out, some people who actually break out on their own and look to develop new games.

I know of one company in Montreal, called Red Barrels, that is developing its own video game now with support from the FMC, Fonds des médias du Canada, the Canada media fund. That support is great for our industry because we need all types of companies to have that ecosystem, bigger companies like us but also small start-ups that can break out and be the next Ubisoft or BioWare.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

You have 45 seconds left.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

That's not bad.

Let me go back to the education part of it again. Are there people who are sponsored in any way, shape, or form from either provincial or federal governments? For example, can someone who is unemployed—because that happens a lot in our region—apply to get education through the human resources department, and you take them into your training program, or do you finance everything?

[Luc Duchaine]

For the e-campus, Ubisoft had financing from the government, but right now we're financing with external partners. For example, Autodesk, which is doing software, partners up with us to train those guys.

[Richard Iwaniuk]

For us, we predominantly finance it ourselves. There are some internship programs where we work with some of the universities across Canada, but it's predominantly funded by us.

[Martin Carrier]

We have bursary programs through the universities. That's how we support this—

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Thank you, Mr. Carrier.

Did you want to complete one?

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

No, it was just a final comment. I was just trying to understand the levers of government financing for things like arts and culture. I'm trying to figure how you factor into it. I'm getting the feeling it's not a hell of a lot. All right.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Thank you very much, Mr. Simms.

Mr. Calandra, it's your turn.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

Thank you.

I wonder if one or all three of you could just expand on intellectual property and protections that are required, especially in our trade agreements, with respect to intellectual property, and how we can do better if we're not doing well right now.

[Martin Carrier]

Sure. Obviously, just to state it again, intellectual property is what we invest in. It's our brands. It's how we create content. It's really paramount to our business.

Certainly we look for protection across the board as far as IP is concerned, and especially online. Sometimes it's not overly clear that everything is protected to the degree we want. Obviously, as the IP owners, we are looking for the utmost protection online or through other media. For us it's certainly something that is important.

[Richard Iwaniuk]

Likewise, for BioWare specifically, we own most of the IPs we are working in, so we do spend a fair amount of time and effort on enforcement.

It's a balance. We don't want to punish the people who are buying and engaging with our content, and that means fan sites, that means their wanting to create certain content in our universes. We try to balance that to make sure it's truly the outside infringements we're trying to prevent.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

Is it the online universe that is your greatest source of attacks on intellectual property? Are there countries in the world that cause you more grief than others as we seek to bring even more success to your industry and more exports of your products?

What should we be looking for?

[Luc Duchaine]

One area where I would say that our intellectual property is maybe under attack is piracy.

Right now the market is shifting a bit for PC games. We have what we call free-to-play games. I don't know how familiar you are with that. It's a game you start playing for free, and if at one point you want to keep upgrading your character, you need to pay. Some guys will spend a lot of money on it. You would be impressed by how much money some spend. It's in the thousands of dollars. They are called the whales. That's a typical name in video gaming. It's about 1% of the audience, but about 90% do not pay a dime.

When we do a game on a PC or even on a console, there is piracy. I don't know if we've ever put a number on it, but it's costing a lot of money. People will do the simple math. We know that about a million people are playing, and we've sold, let's say, 50,000 copies or 100,000 copies. People will do simple conversions, saying we should have sold.... Some of them will never buy. Still, for me, it's piracy. It's stealing. They're stealing something that is not theirs, and people shouldn't do that.

That's one area that could potentially help us. It costs money. As Martin was saying, it costs tens of millions of dollars to develop a high-quality game.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

Obviously, it costs thousands of jobs when people are stealing content.

During the Bill C-11 hearings, we heard a lot about digital locks. A lot of people suggested that we could take down digital locks. What's your position on that? How would a lack of digital locks impact your industry?

[Richard Iwaniuk]

I'm not familiar with that terminology.