Dyack: Government Subsidies Draining Canada's Game Dev Talent

Silicon Knights' Dyack: Quebec Game Company Subsidies 'Insane'. Talking as part of an in-depth studio tour posted on Gamasutra today, Ontario-based Silicon Knights founder Denis Dyack has been discussing the state of Canadian game development, suggesting subsidies from the Quebec government to companies such as Ubisoft, EA, and Eidos are "insane" and probably unsustainable.

In the course of discussing Eternal Darkness and Too Human developer Silicon Knights, which, at 160 employees, is the biggest game developer in Ontario, Dyack commented on what he saw as a 'brain drain' for qualified game employees from his area.

He noted: "Because all of our universities and colleges are subsidized by the government, what we're doing is training all of these people, educating them, and then they're leaving. We've got to stop that, but the government realizes that too. Most people trained in Ontario would like to stay in Ontario, so let's start giving jobs to people here, let's keep it on Ontario and let's stop the brain-drain to Quebec or wherever."

[Mr Marbles]

this is why it fails everytime. Didn't anyone learn anything from the Soviet Union?

[bednet]

Comparing this to the Soviet Union is far fetched. The way I see it is that in order to get people to want to remain in a certain area (e.g. Montreal) there needs to be an industry there.

What Quebec is doing is it's subsidizing these big companies so that they'll get established there, this in turn spawns many smaller dev shops, that may be independent or just help the big guys in specific areas of technology. Once you have a couple thousand people working and the industry is strong, you can lower the subsidies and have these thousands of people live, play and spend their above average salaries in Quebec.

Montreal is becoming the Hollywood of gaming...