Industry Committee on March 24th, 2014

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

Welcome to the 15th meeting of the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology. We continue on our study of the entertainment software industry in Canada.

Colleagues, we have some business to take care of, so I'm going to be targeting about 10 minutes at the end. I know your agenda says about five, but we'll target 10 minutes, because I know there's usually a transition as we wish the best adieu to our witnesses. We'll have one item in public and one item in camera.

Without any other delay, let me introduce the witnesses we have here.

Our first witness is from Warner Bros. Games Montréal. Martin Carrier is vice-president and studio head.

On video conference from Vancouver, British Columbia, from the Centre for Digital Media, we have Richard Smith, director and professor of the master of digital media program.

On video conference from London, Ontario, from Digital Extremes, we have Michael Schmalz, president.

Colleagues, there's just one thing before we begin with Mr. Carrier's opening remarks. Please remember that we have folks on teleconference. I know it's easy to forget because they're on the screen rather than live with us, so please make sure they get adequate questions as well.

Monsieur Carrier, please go ahead with your opening remarks.

[Martin Carrier, Vice-President and Studio Head, Warner Bros. Games Montréal]

Good afternoon.

Thank you so much for having me this morning. I would like to first apologize. I have a “man cold”, so I may sound a little “Clint Eastwoodesque”, but since I'm from Warner Bros., that should be a good fit.

My name is Martin Carrier. I am Studio Head at Warner Brothers Games Montréal. I am pleased to appear before you today to help you better understand the Canadian video games sector. I thank the committee for having invited me. After my presentation, I will be pleased to answer your questions.

I am wearing three hats as I sit before you: I represent Warner Brothers, but I'm also president of Alliance numérique, the Quebec video games industry umbrella group, and a member of the board of directors of the Entertainment Software Association of Canada, better known as ESAC.

I have worked in the video game industry in Canada since 1997. I began my career at Ubisoft Montreal. I also worked in Paris. From 2008 to 2010, I worked as a consultant, setting up a new studio in Montreal which became the Warner Brothers Studio.

I am going to tell you a bit about Warner Brothers Games Montréal, the Warner Brothers development studio.

I have just a couple of notes. I heard before we started that we had some fans of Looney Tunes in the house. I heard some great impressions. Obviously, we know Warner Bros. from TV and we know Warner Bros. from the movie side of the business. We've been around for 90 years and we've been known for some classics throughout those years. About seven years ago, we turned our sights to video games as a way to bring some of our content to the new masses of consumers, namely those people who play video games. We have great brands that we use and that we can bring through the medium of video games.

As Warner Bros. decided to enter the space of video games, we acquired studios around the world. We have studios in the U.K., and in Seattle, Chicago, and Boston, among other places. In 2010 we decided to set up a studio in Canada because, as I told the folks at Warner Bros., if you want to make movies, you should go to Hollywood and if you want to make video games, Montreal is definitely a place where you want to be.

That did not endear me to the movie-making community in Montreal. However, I do believe it is the place to be for video games.

The Montreal studio activities began on June 1, 2010. On that first day, there were four of us. I am proud to tell you that today, 400 people work in Montreal for Warner Brothers. We work on the studio's big brands, that is to say everything related to DC Comics, such as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, The Flash and all the others, and also of course, Looney Tunes, as I mentioned briefly. Warner Brothers owns many properties.

In four years, we launched four major titles. First, Batman Arkham City Armored Edition, for Wii U. That also includes two titles for children, Cartoon Universe, which features Looney Tunes, and Scooby-Doo, as well as LEGO Legend of CHIMA Online, that can be played online on the Web, and simultaneously, on iPhone and iPad mobile devices, which constitutes a first in that market. Our most important product is Batman Arkham Origins. That game was offered for sale on October 25 last. From the outset it ranked first in global sales, and was among the first 20 most successful video games at the end of the year. That is a huge success for a young studio like ours.

To achieve that level of success and quality, we count on multidisciplinary teams made up of artists, designers and computer programmers. Clearly in Montreal we have an incredible talent pool. In a radius of 2 km, about 6,000 people work in the video game sector. This concentration is unequalled anywhere else in the world. That is an incredible asset, and one of the reasons that explains our meteoric growth in Montreal.

From our studio in Montreal, we have also built our quality control global excellence centre.

They are also known as testers, and do the quality assurance on our products.

Thanks to our testing and production activities, we create hundreds of jobs in Quebec and contribute to an ecosystem that employs 9,000 people in the province.

Building on the success we have known up till now, we anticipate going from 400 to 500 employees in our studio, by 2018 at the latest. We can thus say without reservation that the headquarters of Warner Brothers, based in Burbank California, trusts its Canadian studio and the business environment that surrounds it. I must point out that this business environment and the special expertise of Canadian resources and talents are important for the growth of the studio.

When I am asked the question, I like to remind people that in Canada video games began to take root in the 1980s when the NFB launched digital animation programs that led Daniel Langlois to create Softimage. This led to the creation of a creative and technological community, which then led to video games.

From that spark the sector grew quickly, relying on a strong academic environment and partnerships with institutions. In Quebec, tax credits were the real spark plug that was the catalyst for existing conditions involving high technology, the academic environment and creativity.

Government programs, it must be said, including provincial tax credits or federal R&D credits such as the SR&ED program allow us to be competitive as a studio within the Warner Brothers Group. Since our name is “Warner Brothers”, people come to us every week to ask us to open a studio in their area. In Montreal we compete internationally to obtain a mandate. So it is important that we benefit from a positive competitive and regulatory environment to help us attain that objective.

This also allows us to take certain risks and to innovate by creating a game such as LEGO Legends of Chima.

I see Mr. Van Kesteren has an iPad, I believe.

Maybe he's playing Lego Legends of Chima online as we speak.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Martin Carrier]

He could be. I'll make sure to check afterwards.

[A voice]

It's multiplayer.

[Martin Carrier]

It is multiplayer, so maybe someone else is using their iPhone to play with Mr. Van Kesteren.

That is the type of innovation we've been able to create out of Montreal using the different programs that I have mentioned before. That game, using the Lego licence that we work with, is something that is unique, that you can play on the web and you can play also on your iOS Apple device.

We compete with other Canadian enterprises to benefit from various programs. During the various meetings of this committee, you have had the opportunity of discovering an industry that is worth supporting, and whose future is very bright.

I must not forget to mention that federal research and development programs could be improved to encourage sectors that show strong growth and contribute particularly to the development of new technologies and expertise.

Canada excels at video game technology. Our slogan is the same as Canada's slogan at the Sochi Olympic Games: “Let's go for gold”. However, as in hockey, we need talented people in order to succeed.

Which leads me to talk about resources, a key issue for our sector. By resources, I mean the talent that exists in Canada. Others have mentioned it before the committee before me. We compete with studios everywhere in the world. We even compete with our own studios, for instance in London, England. Sometimes we look for people who have very specific expertise, but there are very few of these people throughout the world. It is important for us to have access to the best candidates from all over the world.

Although Canada is in a good position to train the best employees, sometimes we have to go abroad to fill certain positions demanding a particular level of expertise and experience. Sometimes there are only a few people in the global industry who have relevant experience or who have developed innovative techniques or processes.

I will give you a quick example of an international search for talent that we had to do before we started our game Batman: Arkham Origins. We needed a creative director, someone who is technically very savvy, who is also very creative, as per the position title. We eventually found this person to be working in North Carolina. He was a Scotsman who had worked in Vancouver for EA, had moved to North Carolina and was working for Epic. We eventually brought him back to Montreal.

This is just to illustrate the flow of talent and how that can work in our industry. And when we need that guy or that gal, we're very adamant that we need to be able to get that, and we hope to be able to have flexibility in our programs on the federal side so we can bring in these people in a very timely manner, because if we find someone, you can be sure that someone else knows they exist and is trying to get them also. We'd rather have them here with us and help develop our young talent than have them go somewhere else.

Qualified foreign professionals are essential to fill important gaps at the studio, when they give us an advantage by transferring knowledge.

Delays and restrictions related to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program are preventing the needs of the Canadian video games sector from being met. The sector hires highly skilled workers—let me emphasize the fact that they are highly skilled—who are paid much more than the national average, and contribute to the growth of a sector that is a leader in the digital economy.

As you have surely heard from some of my colleagues, each person we bring here represents a major investment and we do not do so lightly. These are very calculated investments and we hope to obtain excellent yields from them in knowledge and leadership. As is often said, few people in the sector come from other countries, but they are important people, and often, their contribution helps in job retention.

In closing I would like to emphasize the fact that the video game sector is a niche sector within other digital industries. It shows that Canada can compete in the world and succeed. This sector shows that Canada can and must continue to encourage job creation for the workers of the future.

Thank you very much. I would be pleased to answer your questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Merci, Monsieur Carrier.

Now we'll move on to Richard Smith, who's with us via teleconference, please.

[Dr. Richard Smith, Director and Professor, Master of Digital Media Program, Centre for Digital Media]

Good afternoon, everyone, it's my pleasure to join you here. Chairperson, honourable members, and witnesses, thanks for including me in this committee's activities. I especially appreciate the opportunity to appear by video conference and avoid the travel.

I'm a professor from Simon Fraser University, but my role is as a director of the Centre for Digital Media, which is a joint venture of four universities: the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and the British Columbia Institute of Technology. We have a professional master's program called the master of digital media program, and it's one of the main outcomes of that joint venture of four universities.

This initiative—four universities working together—originated in a gift from a company called Finning. They're a Canadian global dealer of heavy equipment. They're the people who sell you your Caterpillar bulldozer, truck, or whatever. They're based in Canada, but they operate worldwide, and from the middle of the last century, they've performed what you'd call final assembly, customization, and service for the engines of a resource-based economy.

When they left their headquarters, which is near the rail yards in southeast False Creek in Vancouver, they donated the 18 acres of land there to the four universities. Since that time, we've dedicated ourselves to the same project in a way: the final assembly, customization, and service not of physical engines but the intellectual engines of a digital economy, highly qualified people.

It's a bit of a gimmick to make that connection between Caterpillar tractors and people, but on the other hand it is very much the case that young people, technically savvy people—as a previous witness just spoke of—are the engines of this economy. As I said, the main activity at our centre for digital media is a professional master’s degree but we also have space for digital media firms, spinoffs from our school, and others who are attracted to the site, both Canadian and non-Canadian companies that come there, as well as events and non-credit offerings.

Many of our graduates go on to create their own companies, and we try to support those entrepreneurial ventures with space and support, but I'm going to try to focus my remarks on the program itself, the jobs the students get, the graduates get, and the companies they create upon their completion.

The digital media industry was the impetus for creating our school. This is not, to be fair, the brainchild of the universities. It really was the industry that got the other parties going, and Electronic Arts in particular provided a $1.25 million donation to get things started, and they pushed things through something called the Premier's Technology Council in a previous government that got provincial funding for the start-up and operation of the school—about $40 million.

There was a larger vision for this centre. It was going to be the world centre for digital media, and a lot of other funding was sought that did not materialize, but we have been quite successful with the funding we did receive—about $40 million. Because of that high initial support, good business planning, and to be honest, high tuition fees, the school operates on a break-even basis, including full accounting of all cost of facilities, operations, faculty, and staff. That's a pretty remarkable achievement for a graduate program in Canada, not to be dependent on taxpayers.

We enrol about 50 students every year in a one-year intensive program. It's course and project work, and they follow that year by a four-to-eight-month internship that takes about two semesters. In a typical year about two-thirds of our students come from outside Canada, paying about $52,000 in tuition. Canadians pay two-thirds of that, about $30,000.

They receive a graduate degree. A master of digital media, and it's accredited by all four universities, a unique thing, a parchment with four seals on it. That four-university arrangement has its advantages, but it also has its challenges, and I have to attend a lot of senate meetings and things like that. But we've simplified things a little by having one of the partners, Simon Fraser University, effectively be the managing partner, handling financial services, student services, and academic services.

I am sure you are not so much interested in the day-to-day running of the school as you are in the career outcomes. I will talk to those in a moment, but I wanted to talk a bit about the uniqueness of our program, because I think it speaks to what's different about a digital economy and why it requires a special kind of education and a special kind of support.

Ours is a graduate degree. The students arrive with a bachelor’s degree from across a broad range of fields. About a quarter of the people we recruit you would call technical. They have computer science and engineering degrees. About another quarter are in fine arts and animation, and then the remaining half of the students come from almost any area—business, finance, science, arts, or social sciences. Digital media is fundamentally a blending of art and technology, and that blending is typically done by the people who are in neither camp but are in between those camps, because you're really trying to blend content with technology.

There are three main aspects to our program. There's coursework, which anybody with a graduate degree or undergraduate degree would be familiar with. We have a big project activity, which is a little bit different from the internship with which people are probably familiar. The courses are offered in a regular classroom although there are a lot of whiteboards and room for group activities, but it would look pretty familiar to anybody familiar with university education.

We have courses in creativity and storytelling, project management, digital media theory, law, and business. Those take the entirety of the first term really and get the students ready for their second term, which is unique to our school because it is a project term. The students take on a sponsored team project with a real client, real deliverables, and a real deadline. We have a faculty supervisor, and the sponsor also provides weekly supervision. It's experiential, project-based learning at its best, and the students learn at a “gut-feel” level by actually delivering to real clients and getting the network they will need after graduation.

They take a course in interaction design concurrently, but otherwise they work four days a week on 12 credits equivalent to a master’s thesis. They're doing it in a group and they're building something. They're making a prototype, a proof of concept, or a vertical slice of a game. They're doing some sort of applied research and development.

The third term can be a reprise of the second term with another sponsored project, but they're also offered the opportunity to broaden and deepen their knowledge by taking an elective course, quite often from our partner universities. They can go to UBC, SFU, Emily Carr, or BCIT. They also have the opportunity to substitute for that second industry project what we call a “pitched project,” in which they do product development of an idea of their own. About one third of our students elect to do that. What they're really doing is starting a business at that point.

In their fourth term—so after a year of coursework when they come back in the fall—they go into an internship term. Probably two-thirds of the students go on to do what we would call a regular internship, a paid placement at a digital media company, usually in Vancouver but it can be all around the world. Almost one third of the other students elect to take that pitched project they did in the summertime and turn it into a real business. They form what we call a “venture internship” in which they form a company and effectively hire themselves as their first interns. We provide space and mentoring support with entrepreneurs and residents and so on, as well as some physical facilities that they need.

A small number of students seek further education—they maybe want to go on to do a Ph.D. We provide an opportunity for them to go and work in a lab or something. We call that an academic entrepreneurship.

What are the outcomes of this kind of an education? We have very high placement rates. This is a program that industry wanted, that industry pushed for. Industry hires almost all of our graduates either immediately upon graduation or within a couple of months. Our students have very good outcomes in terms of staying in the industry. It is a volatile industry, and there's a lot of grunt work that sometimes grinds people out, but our students move into higher positions of product design, product management, and leadership. Really the motivation for our school was a recognition that Canada produced excellent undergraduate people in digital media, but not enough people trained in management.

Our students are able to ride out the inevitable ups and downs in that industry and continue on, and to start businesses as well. We've had 11 spinoff companies since the program started in 2007.

Your focus is the entertainment software industry, and that's video games. About 40% of our graduates go into video games directly, but I think importantly, the other 60% go into a broad range of industries. I think this is indicative of the enormous impact video games are having on everything else in the world, ranging from banking, to health care, to education, to retail. Our students are in all of those sectors.

The lessons learned about engagement, about how to find and retain customers, how to keep people going, all those lessons learned in virtual worlds are playing out in the real world now with things like 3-D printing and immersive and augmented reality. Our students are part of that revolution that's changing the entire world, not just the video game world.

When our school started, that's when the iPhone launched, so there was a moment in time when everything was about the virtual and online world. Then it became all about the mobile and ubiquitous world. We've transitioned quite a bit.

I think the third wave is upon us now. It's really the things we call Internet of things and augmented reality, all the ways in which digital media is coming into our cars, into our houses, and into our built environments. It's a very exciting time, but it's also very challenging.

I look forward to answering your questions, and talking about how highly qualified people play a big role in that future.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Thank you very much, Mr. Smith.

Now it's on to Mr. Schmalz for his opening remarks.

[Michael Schmalz, President, Digital Extremes]

I'd like thank the committee for asking me to speak before you. I'm delighted to tell the story of Digital Extremes and to answer any of your questions about our company or our place in the Canadian and international game industry.

Digital Extremes is an independent video game developer, meaning we're not associated with any other publishers or any other part of the industry, and we work completely independent of them. We were founded in 1993 so we're now in our 21st year of operation. We have a 35,000-square-foot studio that's presently located in London, and we employ about 200 people.

The games that we make primarily have been for retail sales, and they've primarily been the box games. We have focused in the last 10 or 12 years on making the big box console games, and have worked with a number of different publishers, making games on our own and also in collaboration with other game companies. We've worked on some of the big game industry franchises, such as Halo and BioShock. We've done some work-for-hire projects doing a comic book adaptation of a game, The Darkness, and also a movie adaptation for a large-budget video game for Star Trek, collaborating with Paramount.

Back when we started Digital Extremes in 1993, the video game industry literally did not exist in North America. There was nothing here. Our games were highly pixelated pinball games that were distributed on clones of 386 computers in a day before the Internet really was anywhere. People would get our games for free when they bought a cloned computer, or a clone computer, and they'd play through it a little bit. There would be a screen at the end saying that if they liked our game to please mail a cheque to this address and we would send them the rest of it, or some extra levels, or some extra pinball tables.

That's how we got started. We had the good fortune, shortly after, of teaming up with an American company called Epic Games and working on the Unreal franchise, which was also primarily a PC game.

In 2003, we realized as an independent developer that the industry was moving towards consoles. That year, there were more people playing video games on consoles, such as Xbox and PlayStation, than there were on PCs. So we adapted our techniques and our technology and transformed our company into primarily a console company. For roughly the last 10 years, we've been making games, first for the Xbox and then the Xbox 360, as well as for PlayStation. Again, those have been mostly work-for-hire projects.

The industry of course, during those years, developed in ways we never envisioned it would. It was becoming bigger and more spectacular, and in fact an increasingly difficult place for an independent developer to compete. Unlike some of the larger publishers that have been around for 15 or 20 years, in which the names don't change, it's very uncommon for an independent developer to be able to stay around that long. Many of our independent game companies don't get the hits and go out of business.

I want to emphasize that we, the content creators, are probably at the most precarious end of the game industry, because when things don't work out—and it has been, quite honestly, a very difficult last five years for the game industry—that's where the hardship hits the most. You'll see that a lot of the layoffs and studio closures do in fact impact the independent game developers.

Over the past 10 years, Digital Extremes have developed our own proprietary game development technology with the aid of the federal SR and ED program. This has given us some competitive advantages in allowing us to create video games more efficiently, and to be able to develop certain functionality in ways that other developers have a difficult time doing.

Our most recent transition, then, has taken place probably in these last one or two years, in which we have gone away from the retail boxed-game sales into the digitally distributed, free-to-play model using microtransactions. This is getting back to the roots of our gaming of almost 20 years ago. It's an interesting cycle where we will publish a game on the Internet for free. People download it for free, and then if they like it, they have the opportunity to buy additional features or additional items in the game for which we can charge them via a microtransaction model over the Internet. Presently, our last game called Warframe is monetizing like that in about 125 different countries around the world, and is doing quite well for us.

I also want to emphasize the fact that the colleges and universities, over the past 10 years since we've been in operation, have been very, very good at developing entry-level designers, artists, and programmers. We're very fortunate to have such a great system.

Unfortunately, for many of those years, our American and other friends realized that there were also great resources here, and we had a lot of game industry professionals move to the United States and elsewhere to take up that profession. As a result, one of the common themes is that finding mid-level and senior-level employees with 5, 10, or 15 years of experience continues to be a challenge in Canada. We want to grow the industry, and the current immigration policies make it difficult, especially for independent developers to be able to tap the wealth of experience that exists outside the country.

We feel that the immigration system is more set up to keep people out than try to find reasons to let qualified people in. So I would also support that point that was made earlier on today.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Thank you very much for your opening remarks, Mr. Schmalz.

We'll now go to rounds of questions. Colleagues, we're at seven minutes, straight across the board. That should bring us—if everybody is disciplined—right to the time when we need to give our witnesses a thank you and ask them to depart so we can go into some committee business.

I'll begin with Mr. Lake for seven minutes.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to all the witnesses today. I'm going to start, if I could, with Mr. Smith.

Mr. Smith, you bring an interesting perspective to the conversation because we've heard much said about the quality of Canadian employees in this industry, but have also heard there is a lack at that higher experience level.

As I listened to you, when you talk about your students, I was wondering, first of all, about their backgrounds. You said what degree backgrounds they're coming from. Are there a number of them who are coming with a certain level of experience within the industry before they come to you for their master's program?

[Dr. Richard Smith]

Yes. We have the traditional graduate student, I guess, who has just finished their graduate degree or is maybe one or two years out. Our average age is I think about 27. We have students in their thirties and forties and actually even one or two in their fifties, so I think for a number of people it's.... Quite often, people get started in the game industry with a bachelor's degree. They rise to a certain level. A few of those people go right to the top, but others just kind of top out and are not getting the advances they'd like. For some of those people, our program is a way to advance in your career and take on those roles that are more in management and are so essential to the growth and sustainability of viable companies. It's one thing to have a vision and a passion for digital media, but you have to run a real business. That's one group of people, and quite often they have five or ten years' experience.

The second group of people who have experience and come to our program are people who are looking to transition from some other industry and into digital media. I have a couple of architects. I've had teachers. I have people in the business world and in science. Everybody around us realizes the importance of digital media, but they don't have the training and, importantly, they don't have the network. That's why people do an M.B.A.; it's for the people you do the M.B.A. with. By doing a graduate degree in digital media, those people get not just an education, but also a network.

In a third group are people who are coming back for certification and the sort of elite training they really need to advance their career. I have this year three people who are currently college and university instructors and who managed to rise up to a certain level with their talent, but they aren't going to move on to full professor or whatever because they don't have a graduate degree yet. That's a third group.

But across that, we do have a fair number of people with training, and that is a really important thing for the quality of this school, too, so we really appreciate having them.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

In terms of the program you have, are there other organizations in Canada doing similar work to yours, with similar programs, and if so, to what level do you work in cooperation with them?

[Dr. Richard Smith]

We're ourselves a copy of a program called ETC at Carnegie Mellon University. About three years ago, the University of Waterloo launched a program that's based in Stratford and is very similar to ours. It's called “master of technology and digital entrepreneurship” or something like that. Just last year, Ryerson launched a program, with the assistance of my predecessor to set up another master of digital media program at Ryerson. It's substantially the same, especially in the coursework component, although they have sort of dialled back the project aspect, which is a very difficult thing to manage, quite honestly. I think we now do a good job of it, but I think that's partly why Ryerson chose not to go down that path. It is a very challenging enterprise to keep that running.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

How much interaction do you have with those other organizations or other groups that are doing the same thing, just to ensure that we're....? We've heard about this significant need from the industry. How comprehensive is the approach on the academic side?

[Dr. Richard Smith]

I'd say it's modest at best. For example, if you were hearing from schools of engineering, they would have a national council and a professional association and all that sort of stuff to deliver a coordinated effort.

I know the people who run the other programs. We've gone to visit them. They've come to visit us. But it is very much on an informal basis. There's not any sort of mechanism to coordinate our activities. We don't really have anything formalized to do that. It probably would be a good idea, but we're only six or seven years old, and the others are really just two and three years old, so we're maybe a little young yet to have that kind of coordinated approach.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

Thanks, Richard. I'm going to switch over to Martin.

Martin, I have to follow that same theme. You said that there are 6,000 people in Montreal, I believe, 6,000 people working in that two-kilometre area. To what extent is there interaction? Obviously there are competitors in that area, but there's definitely a common interest in growing the industry. Also, you would face common problems, as you've mentioned, with labour. We've heard everybody talking about the labour, especially in that high end or mid-to-high end.

To what extent is there interaction and cooperation among the companies to, number one, get together, talk about the issues, and identify those common issues, and then to, number two, work with organizations like Richard's to come up with ways to address them?

[Martin Carrier]

I've been around since about 1997 in the games industry in Montreal, so I've had time to see things ebb and flow and there was a time where it was actually a lot more about competition than it was about cooperation.

We'll always be competing companies in the sense that we put out competing products, but I would say over the past two years there has certainly been a change in the scenery in the fact that now the companies in Montreal—and also in Quebec City, where there's another sizable hub—are definitely working together. One of the ways we do that is through Alliance numérique, which I mentioned before, and through ESAC also. We're also working with the different schools in the city, both at the college level, or CEGEP, and universities.

So you can see a sign of maturity in the industry in that sense. Technologically we're always on the edge, so it's never mature, but in terms of the industry you can see something that's really coalescing into an ecosystem that is a lot stronger and a lot tighter than it once was.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Thank you very much, Mr. Carrier, that's all the time we have.

Now we go to Ms. Nash for seven minutes.

[Peggy Nash, NDP, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I want to say it's a real pleasure to be part of the industry committee again. Mr. Warawa and I go back a number of years on this committee so it's great to be back here.

My three sons would be thrilled to know that in my first meeting I'm here studying the video gaming industry.

Mr. Carrier, I have to ask you, how do you get to be a video game tester? My kids really would want to know.

[Martin Carrier]

You look for the oversized thumbs, that gives it away, usually.

There's no particular curriculum that people follow. It's probably one of the areas in our industry that hasn't yet really professionalized itself. There are some programs more on the high school level in Montreal that guide people towards this, but it's not—

[Peggy Nash, NDP, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

So gamers just compete? It's just whoever plays the most games?

[Martin Carrier]

It's about knowledge. The cliché is that people are just playing, but they're actually really testing and they have extensive and exhaustive test cases that they have to go through and follow, so it is very technical work.

I worked in aerospace before 1997, before games, and in testing QA there was a very professionalized approach in that you can get a technical degree in that kind of QA-ing. But you can't yet in our sector. As we saw with our game, Arkham Origins, suddenly we're testing a product that is much more complicated than before, that is online, that has integrated microtransactional aspects as Mr. Schmalz was alluding to. We're now seeing that it's much more complex, so the oversized thumbs just don't do it any more, we need people who actually have gone to school and have a very good analytical mind.

[Peggy Nash, NDP, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

You need an oversized brain as well, now.