Certainly, it's a great question.
I would say that first and foremost, the entertainment software industry is a great example of a domestic Canadian industry that has always been global in view and scope. We haven't been focused on developing content for our domestic market, but have always been looking at the United States, Europe, and Asia as marketplaces. Because this has been pretty much baked into the industry from the get-go, it's made it a lot easier for us to transition to global marketplaces. The world has become a lot smaller in the past 10 to 15 years, and we've certainly been in a good position to capitalize on that.
In a similar vein, our industry would not exist—at least not in the way it does today—without foreign direct investment. Essentially, our industry has been built on the investments made by companies like Electronic Arts from the United States or Ubisoft from France, which have poured millions of dollars into the studios here that employ thousands of people in these high-paying jobs and develop world-class content that is distributed throughout the world.
These investments in turn led to the formation of studios. People would go off and form their own independent studios and be their own independent Canadian businesses, which has really built the entire ecosystem that we see today. It's one of the reasons among many that we actually see the clustering effect. It's also because you do have these investments that were made, and you have a kind of acorn--it's like a tree that grows and spreads out from those initial investments.
I think it's a valuable lesson to be learned and there's actually a lot to be said about it, especially when you're investing in the creation of a studio or a permanent firm. Again, there is no risk of Ubisoft picking everyone in Ubisoft Montreal and then shipping them back to France. No one is going to go; they're all Canadians and they work at a Canadian company.
As a result, we've actually seen a significant development because of that kind of investment.