Video games are artistic and deserve Canadian support: proponents

The creation of original intellectual property in video games development is critical to the industry’s success in Canada, and the government has an important role to play in nurturing firms creating titles outside the mainstream of licensing and sequels, attendees to the Montreal Games Summit in Montreal November 3 and 4 heard. In a session hosted by International Games Developer Association program director Jason Della Rocca, the audience was presented with the conundrum of modern-day games development - whether to pursue established Hollywood properties such as Harry Potter and other movie and TV titles, or work from scratch to develop original games. The answer, says Della Rocca, is that the industry relies on established properties to generate reliable profits for shareholders, but that the industry will stagnate without the creation of new titles. Further, he noted, original IP is the surest path to spectacular success as compared with less risky titles with lower potential upside. Della Rocca pointed to such titles as Super Mario, Legend of Zelda, SimCity, Myst and others as examples of how a new idea can take the game world by storm to create blockbuster success. But, he noted, games publishers are putting comparatively little investment into new IP. He cited statistics that Electronic Arts puts only 3% of its resources into original titles, Nintendo 12%, and Sega 5%. Yet, he says, most of the worst titles to hit the market - those poorly reviewed by gaming enthusiasts, have been based on Hollywood titles and other franchises. He pointed to unit sales and profits to show, however, that while franchise titles rarely reach the highest levels of sales, they are more consistently profitable, and present less business risk to the large, publicly-traded publishers. Della Rocca concluded his presentation by pointing to the need for creative ways to fund new intellectual property development in the industry, including through government support. In comments to Canadian NEW MEDIA, he defended the cultural basis for such aid, emphasizing that provincial and federal governments should be concentrating on new IP versus developing established Hollywood and other franchises. “If the Canadian government, or the provincial government, or Telefilm, whatever the support is, if that support’s just sort of generically going to a studio because they want to create jobs and stuff, and that studio goes off and works on some Hollywood license - fine, ok, that’s created some jobs and some notoriety for a local studio. I don’t want to say it’s shooting ourselves in the foot, but it’s really just one step. It’s just creating a few jobs for a couple of months or a year or whatever. Whereas, if, via whatever mechanisms from Telefilm or whatever provincial means of support, they are able to help a studio create a prototype of original new IP, and then that prototype was picked up by a publisher, and then they budget to hire staff and produce a game - the probability is still slight, but had breakthrough success, now, that’s generating major wealth for that studio. Generating major wealth for those employees and tax base and all that kind of economic trickle-down, but that’s what’s going to generate the notoriety for. That’s going to bring more talent. It’s going to drive up interest. It’s going to bring more companies that are looking at, well, what are those guys doing over there. That’s what’s happening in Montreal to some extent, right? Based on some of the successes, people are saying, hey, we need a studio there because we need access to that talent. But, what they’re doing, they’re creating games and that’s what helps snowball things.” Ray Muzyka, co-CEO of Edmonton-based BioWare Corp., agrees with Della Rocca that government assistance can help. At the Montreal Games Summit, he told CNM that the company has used Industrial Research Assistance Program and Western Economic Diversification funds in the past to help fund early development of its titles. “Some of that helps with training and sometimes it helps with hiring new staff as well. Alberta generally as a province has a lot less of that than, say, a few other provinces do like B.C. and Quebec, for example, or Ontario. But, I think it can be a viable way to kickstart an industry in a particular region. It’s valuable for that, and it certainly gives developers a lot of assistance early on when they’re struggling to get distribution or partners to help them publish their games - gets them out of the prototype phase at the critical point.” As debate continues about the cultural mandate for funding video games development, Muzyka says the medium can be an artistic one in which a Canadian perspective comes to light. “I’ve never considered before, but we have a sort of Canadian approach to things. But, it could be that we try to make stories that are actually going to have wide appeal. We try to avoid stories that are going to be exclusionary or divisive. We try to make stories that talk about issues that would be relevant to people all over the world. Canadians generally tend to be very humble. It’s a trait of Canada in general. It’s a trait I really admire personally, and, maybe that’s a common thing in stories from Canadian authors, as well. Sort of embracing diversity - looking internationally in all directions, not just in one place.”

Video games are artistic and deserve Canadian support: proponents

Broadcast | November 16, 2004

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