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.