Interactive Computer and Video Game Industry

Canada has a number of interactive computer and video game companies whose products feature on the international stage. The Vancouver area is currently considered a Canadian hotbed of animation and gaming, being home to nearly 700 gaming companies like Disney Interactive (where I worked for a time), The Coalition Studio and Relic Software. The industry is a mix of animation, software technology and very big business.

Ben Sawyer of Digitalmill, an interactive gaming think-tank, observes that the game industry value chain is made up of six connected and distinct layers:

  1. Capital and publishing layer: involved in paying for development of new titles and seeking returns through licensing of the titles.
  2. Product and talent layer: includes developers, designers and artists, who may be working under individual contracts or as part of in-house development teams.
  3. Production and tools layer: generates content production tools, game development middleware, customizable game engines, and production management tools.
  4. Distribution layer: or the "publishing" industry, involved in generating and marketing catalogs of games for retail and online distribution.
  5. Hardware (or Virtual Machine or Software Platform) layer: or the providers of the underlying platform, which may be console-based, accessed through online media, or accessed through mobile devices such as the iPhone. This layer now includes non-hardware platforms such as virtual machines (e.g. Java or Flash), or software platforms such as browsers or even further Facebook, etc.
  6. End-users layer: or the users/players of the games.

You can see from the above list that the artists and designers who occupy the second layer of a game's development can be part of an in-house team working on production of titles, or contractors who are employed under contract for a period of time to provide character design, scene layout, and such. Most of the larger studios have a very assembly line approach to production, similar to a conventional animation studio. There is a small team of artists devoted to creating the character animation, a small team creating textures for the 3D models, a team creating the environments the player interacts within, and so on.

An art director is usually charged with coordinating all of these teams' efforts so the final product looks cohesive, and a producer works along side the art director to ensure everyone keeps to a (usually aggressive) agreed-upon schedule.

The salary expectations in this industry are usually not too shabby given the education required and the high level of technical and creative ability demanded by the studios. Here are a few more studios you may wish to explore: Bioware in Edmonton, AB; UbiSoft in Montreal, QC, Electronic Arts in Burnaby, BC and Blue Castle Games (now Capcom Vancouver) also in Burnaby, BC.