Canadian Heritage Committee on June 4th, 2026

[Ryan Filsinger]

Yes. As a bit of history, we started Iron Fox four years ago, and a majority of that revenue was brought in through relationships I built 10 years ago.

I had started a small studio here under another larger company in Vancouver, called Kabam, and then there was a chance to go out on my own with some friends whom I've been working with forever. The majority of that revenue was through a work-for-hire stream. We were hired to develop games for a company based out of San Francisco, and that relationship was from work I had done earlier in the 2010s.

We have been able to grow our revenue slowly. There's been a lot of downward pressure on the industry here, mostly from some contextual stuff around COVID. When COVID happened, everybody stayed indoors for very long periods of time. Lots of people played video games, and then they went outside after everything was done. Companies had overhired, and the amount of work out there has contracted significantly over the last few years, but we've been able to stay stable.

Right now, the majority of our revenue stream comes from two places. One is original work for other clients. We have a contract with Electronic Arts to make games for their Pogo.com platform, which is a casual games website. We make word and card games for them. Then we also do work for hire. Other companies contract us to fill needs through engineering design and art talent.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

That's awesome. Thank you very much.

We do well in the video game industry in Canada. We punch above our weight in this industry, and I would say we don't draw a lot of attention to it. It's this quiet thing that goes on in the background, but there's a great deal of success there.

You have received some funding from Canadian Heritage for support—

[Ryan Filsinger]

That is correct, yes.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

—along the way. Some of that funding was to create a video game called Card Scramble: Viola's Diner, and uniquely, this game was targeting 55-plus women.

Can you talk about that as a project?

[Ryan Filsinger]

Yes. It was born of an idea my creative director had, in which we mash up Scrabble and poker.

Instead of playing words on a Scrabble-like board, you score poker hands. It's closer to Yahtzee. We removed a lot of the poker terminology because of the gambling implications. There's no actual gambling in the game. It's just a scoring mechanic.

In the story we built, you are restoring a diner. You're a small-town girl who moves back home and restores her uncle's diner, which was where she learned the game.

We targeted that female age demographic and up because it was mostly through the platform that we partnered with, which was Pogo.com, under Electronic Arts. That demographic is a majority of their audience. We found that one of the things that people assume when they think about video games is that it's mostly male-dominated, 20 to 35 years of age, but that's not true anymore. It's pretty much a fifty-fifty split. It's just that most people in that age range would not self-identify as gamers, even though they're playing Candy Crush or word games like Wordle at The New York Times on a daily basis, and sometimes they play more than what the assumption would be if you asked anybody out on the street.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

About $400,000 of funding was given—

[Ryan Filsinger]

That's correct.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

—in order to assist with the export of this game to make it more visible or available in other markets. I'm curious as to what a strategy looks like with regard to exporting a product like that.

[Ryan Filsinger]

The first time we made the game, it was available only on a dot-com. The strategy behind that was translations first. We had built it in English only, and the first thing we did was translate it into Spanish and French. We then exported it to multiple platforms. It is now available on the Windows store.

As well, we started to use a significant amount of those funds for advertising. The majority of the revenue comes through one stream, so it was to expand the streams of revenue across that project.

We own the intellectual property of that product outright. Sometimes in publishing deals, you have to give up some of your intellectual property, or percentages of it, to get it funded, but in this case, we own everything.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

What measure of success have you had with exporting the game and being able to collect revenue?

[Ryan Filsinger]

The majority of the success we've had is eyeballs. Roughly about 4,000 to 5,000 players per day play this game all across the world. Because of the revenue split that we have, the revenue coming in now is roughly between $5,000 and $10,000 a day. The majority of that right now is to pay off the minimum guarantee style of set-up that we have with our publisher.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Is most of that revenue coming in from purchases of the game, or is it from ads?

[Ryan Filsinger]

No, it's from in-app transactions. We sell power-ups. We give you a puzzle, and then we sell you the solution—

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

That's cool. Thank you very much.

[Ryan Filsinger]

—or new content, if you want. There's also a decoration component. Maybe you want the purple chair instead of the green chair. It's those kinds of things.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

That's awesome.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lisa Hepfner]

Well, as a 55-year-old woman, I can tell you that a cross between Scrabble and poker is right up my alley. I'm totally looking up that game.

[Ryan Filsinger]

It's at violasdiner.com, if I'm allowed to tell you where to play it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lisa Hepfner]

Mr. Al Soud, you now have the floor for six minutes.

[Fares Al Soud, Liberal, Mississauga Centre, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and good morning, everyone. Thank you all for taking the time to be with us today.

Over the past few weeks, I've been watching a show called Off Campus. It's filmed here in Canada, with much of the cast and crew being Canadian. Many on that cast are now being considered overnight success stories. I think it's funny that we often recognize talent only when it's already on that upward trajectory.

The truth is that I think that characterization does more disservice to those in this space than anything else, because it fails to recognize the challenges they faced prior to becoming overnight successes. It really makes you wonder how much talent we miss out on—actors, singers...I'd even extend this to athletes—because we don't always ensure that they get those opportunities where and when they need them most. Local pubs, coffee shops and smaller venues are a fundamental part of artists' progression, and without them, we would risk missing out on some of the greatest talent our country might produce.

Mr. Simms, through your work overseeing cultural programming, concerts and festivals at Glasgow Square Theatre, you support both emerging and established artists while helping to bring cultural experiences to local audiences. How important are regional performance venues in helping artists develop their careers before they reach larger markets, and what would be lost if communities no longer had access to these local stages?

[Morgan Simms]

I strongly believe that regional performance spaces on a smaller level are integral to supporting touring artists and artists who are just trying to sustain careers in their hometowns or in their home provinces without having stages like ours, a 250-cap venue in a rural downtown. The touring artist who may come through this year and then in two years from now to play the Scotiabank arena in Halifax won't have the opportunity to develop their audience and get them to travel to bigger centres to see them.

To name one artist, we had The Beaches headline the Jubilee music festival a couple of years ago to an audience of about 2,500 people. Fast-forward to a year later, and they're playing to 10,000 folks at the Scotiabank arena in Halifax.

Without that discovery platform, artists don't get the opportunity to make connections with people and build audiences to get to that bigger stage. That's tenfold if those spaces disappeared tomorrow. If your pubs, your coffee shops, your small-capacity venues like mine disappeared tomorrow, where are local musicians going to make a living and where are they going to play?

I would argue that the people I bring in for a show with 20 people are just as impactful as someone on the Jubilee stage playing to 3,000 or 4,000 people. They're making connections with everybody in that room. After those 20-person audiences, if you fast-forward five or six years, you see that more often than not they're playing to thousands of people or getting supporting spots at festivals, and so on and so forth. No matter if it's a theatre company or a musician, they need those small stages to sustain their career trajectories or grow their careers.

[Fares Al Soud, Liberal, Mississauga Centre, ON]

That's fantastic. Thank you for that.

Ms. Morin, you've led Arts on the Ave and helped establish initiatives, including the Kaleido Family Arts Festival and the Deep Freeze festival. In a few weeks, Mississauga's Celebration Square will become home to festivals and events weekly, if not almost daily, including World Cup watch parties and the Polish Days festival, which I think is coming up this Saturday, and countless others.

Cultural spending on festivals brings communities together in ways that very few other investments do. That can sometimes go unstated, and I'd like to give you the opportunity to speak to what these investments mean for Canadians, small businesses, artists and our country at large.

[Christy Morin]

Thank you so much.

Absolutely. The festivals are essential to our breath in Canada. We are a leader in Canada when it comes to festivals, and the multidisciplinary festivals are really beginning to surge now. For a long time it was compartmentalized, so it would be a music festival or a theatre festival. Now it's beginning to go across....

I was reading that $21 in the festivals equals $29 in the economy. That number is significant, and we don't often talk about it. When we try to look at the economic impact in KPIs, we smaller organizations don't often have a data analyst sitting there calculating all those numbers, but most certainly it's a significant part of our national economy.

[Fares Al Soud, Liberal, Mississauga Centre, ON]

Mr. Filsinger, anyone who knows me knows that video games are a hobby of mine. Ms. Thomas asked some great questions on this a moment ago. She is absolutely right that Canadians are phenomenal at video game development, and it's a significant entertainment export for us.

In your opening remarks, you referred to the need to recognize creative infrastructure as economic infrastructure. What types of investments do you believe are most important for attracting and retaining game development talent in smaller communities?

[Ryan Filsinger]

I'll point to the one we currently have here in Prince Edward Island, which is quite unique. It's through Innovation PEI, and it's called a video game labour rebate.

The primary difference between what we have here and the tax rebates that happen in Nova Scotia, Quebec and British Columbia is that it's a just-in-time style of program. Every 90 days I submit my payroll and get a rebate back on the talent. Most tax rebates don't show up until 18 or 24 months later. As we're a brand new start-up and cash is tight, having that money flow in every 90 days has kept us alive in periods when we lost contracts or had major life changes in the business.

That specific model is worth our giving up a small percentage. If I have my labour in Nova Scotia or Quebec, I can get upwards of 40% back, whereas for Prince Edward Island, it's only 20%, but the frequency of the payments is significant in terms of accessing it and being able to keep going. That's why I like the model that's been presented here.

There's also the CMF. I have one more comment on the CMF side of things. My studio hasn't benefited from the CMF program, but I've seen the impact of it on original Canadian programming, game development and ideas being developed. There was an increase of $15 million to the fund in April, which has been well received in our industry.