Canadian Heritage committee  Absolutely.

Canadian Heritage committee  BioWare makes role-playing games. It's going to be slightly different, depending on the genre. From our perspective, a game development life cycle typically takes three years. It could be as short as two years if we're benchmarking off existing technologies. It could be as long as four years, maybe even five years, if we're building a new franchise, a new IP, from the ground up.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes. It's artists, animators, writers, designers, and usually the executive producers. The senior leadership team of the particular project does the brainstorming. We'll do some prototyping. We will figure out which features we think we can accomplish and set out points of innovation that we want for the game.

Canadian Heritage committee  When we are in full production, that's where we start to get teams in the range of 150 to 200 people. Again, depending on whether it's new engine technology or something that we're benchmarking on, the programming aspect of it might use 50 to 70 people. The rest of them are content creators.

Canadian Heritage committee  All of us alluded to hiring people, being able to bring in people when we need to. Again, I would point to the more senior people within the organizations. We need them to continue to innovate and advance the industry. That, from our perspective, is certainly the biggest opportunity I see to working with the government: to improve that process.

Canadian Heritage committee  From our perspective, again, I think the industry has come a long way in the last few years. We're starting to build a critical mass of people. Universities are starting to recognize that this is a viable program. Let's use technology as an example. For programming, and I can't speak for the others, the reality is that we haven't hired anyone who hasn't had a masters degree in programming with a specific understanding of game programming.

Canadian Heritage committee  The term “DRM” in our industry means digital rights management. It's exactly that: it's how we manage those digital rights for the consumers of the content.

Canadian Heritage committee  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.

Canadian Heritage committee  I'm not familiar with that terminology.

Canadian Heritage committee  It's basically DRM. If you are discussing the removal of DRM, this is a tricky question. BioWare has taken a different approach with respect to DRM. Our industry has different methodologies. Online connectivity that requires people to authenticate back to the servers to make sure it is a legitimate licence is one of the things we are doing.

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

Canadian Heritage committee  On the acquisition front, yes.

Canadian Heritage committee  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.

Canadian Heritage committee  Certainly, from my perspective and when I look at the companies that we have in Montreal and all Canada, it is a commitment to quality, and within our industry it's a well-respected development community. That quality comes from having quality work environments and being able to hire the right people for the job.

Canadian Heritage committee  Absolutely. Our team's actually on the development side. We'll peak at about 180 to 200 people when they're in full development. Of that, more than 70% are on the artistic side, so whether it's art, animation, the design of the game, a lot less of it's technology from that.