Video-game graphic artists such as Oliver Martin are in demand, so companies such as Ubisoft have started to look outside their traditional talent pool for new recruits.Photograph by: Phil Carpenter
, GAZETTE file photo
MONTREAL – Last year, Old Montreal-based video game company Ludia announced plans to nearly double its staff and hire 100 people within two years to expand its production.
But the company’s hiring drive has stalled at 20, and as a result, it has had to delay its plans.
“We’re suffering from the success story of Montreal,” said Alex Thabet, the CEO of the studio owned by London-based Fremantle Media Ltd. “It’s great we were able to build such a big industry in so little time, but we’re facing other issues that need to be addressed at a given time.”
In the next few years, finding qualified employees in Montreal is going to become even more difficult, as local studios have announced plans that would see Montreal’s video gaming sector grow by 25 per cent from 8,000 now to 10,000 in the next five years or so. In an already fiercely competitive industry, some fear that poaching and dirty tricks will become the norm. Worse, industry insiders say a shortage of talent will drive up salaries, and ultimately remove Montreal’s competitive advantage as a place to set up a gaming studio.
Among the most recent announcements, last November Tokyo-based Square Enix said it would increase the size of its Eidos Montreal studio, and establish a second studio in Montreal, adding a total of 250 employees. Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment recently set up its new studio and plans to grow to 500 people. Sava Transmedia, a new locally owned studio, announced its plans last year to hire its first 200 employees by 2016. Los Angeles-based THQ, best known for pro-wrestling games, and war and fantasy-action titles, announced plans to grow from about 180 currently to 500 in the building formerly occupied by The Gazette on St. Antoine St.
Until now, Montreal’s growth has been pretty steady. The city’s gaming industry essentially began 15 years ago with the establishment of a local studio by Paris-based Ubisoft. The lure of a relatively bilingual city known for its creativity and an understanding of the European market were among the reasons the company chose to establish its studio here. But one key element put Montreal over the top: a government subsidy for 37.5 per cent of employee salaries. That subsidy has remained in place over the years and has been the driving force behind Montreal’s surge to the top five largest gaming centres in the world.
Now, the company that kick-started the city’s gaming industry has signalled concern about its long-term growth prospects.
In an interview last year, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said he would like to increase the production of the Montreal studio, but he doubted the company would be able to hire 500 more employees to reach its goal of 3,000.
“If we could recruit them, we would have them already,” Guillemot told La Presse.
“There isn’t enough talent available, because a lot of other companies have set up shop in Montreal. The Montreal studio could be developing faster. We have a few projects that are lagging a bit.”
Ubisoft is adapting. The company has started to look outside its traditional talent pool for new recruits, said Francis Baillet, the Montreal studio’s vice-president of human resources.
“We have started looking at other industries,” Baillet said. “This year, 35 per cent of my hires are not coming from the typical game industry background: we have people from (television network) TVA, Cirque du Soleil and Yellow Pages. They are programmers, and artists, and we can use that talent. However, we have to invest more aggressively in training.”
Baillet said last year, the company hired 375 people, though he wouldn’t say how many people left the company over the same period.
At Ludia, which specializes in mobile and social games, the popularity of apps for smartphones and Facebook has hurt the company’s hiring drive, Thabet said.
“For a while, we were a bit isolated because everyone was working on console games, and when we started five years ago, Facebook and mobile games were not the hottest topic in town. Now they are.”
Companies are now looking for the same types of employees that Ludia is after. It makes it both difficult to attract new talent, and to keep current employees from leaving.
Thabet said the competition for human resources has been driving up salaries in the industry for several years, and programmers working for video-game companies make significantly more than their counterparts working in other industries.
He added salaries are continuing to escalate to the point that they are no longer offset by the generous tax credits offered to gaming companies.
“In the last five years, salaries have increased by at least the level of the subsidies, which reduces the interest of running a studio here in Montreal,” Thabet said. “I don’t think the trend is improving. One of the major criteria that was attracting a lot of people originally is fading away in terms of its real value.”
That being said, companies continue to choose Montreal as a destination to set up a gaming studio.
The city’s large ecosystem of companies that support video game production (like sound editing studios), and its proximity to Europe, both in geography and the mindset of its population are still seen as major advantages.
But the disadvantages are becoming more worrisome. Companies must pay a premium for employees, and they must worry about losing them to competing studios – a particularly disruptive prospect for video game companies since most projects are long-term ventures that rely on specialized teams. If one person quits, it could delay the production deadline of a game, and potentially cost millions in lost revenue.
Ubisoft has taken an aggressive stance against poaching. Last year, it sued THQ and former Ubisoft employee Patrice Désilets, who jumped ship to lead the development team for THQ’s new Montreal studio.
Ubisoft filed an injunction, saying Désilets would be violating a non-solicitation agreement in his Ubisoft contract if he actively recruited other his former coworkers. Although the legal challenge wasn’t successful, this wasn’t the first time Ubisoft resorted to the courts to stop poaching. In 2003, it won an injunction preventing four of its employees from working for rival Electronic Arts – Montreal’s second-largest studio.
While court challenges are the rare public face of aggressive recruitment practices, the industry’s senior employees are approached regularly by headhunters offering them positions at rival companies – a practice considered unethical.
“A lot of agencies are cold calling, and not respecting people’s privacy,” said Frédérick Brassard, president and talent agent for the recruiting agency 3Pod. “They’re calling people at home, or at the office. It’s unacceptable.”
Anne Gibeault, assistant producer of cinematics at Ubisoft said often recruitment takes on a much less formal tone. She said she has been approached twice with serious offers from recruiters, but she hears regularly of job offers through former colleagues working at other studios.
“A lot of time, people just contact others that they know,” said Gibeault, who has worked at Ubisoft for eight years. “It’s not a formal approach.”
Ubisoft’s Baillet said losing employees to other companies is part of the business, but it’s not something he worries about too much. He said his company’s retention rate hovers around 10 per cent.
“Non-solicitation (contracts) are not something new, and we have enforced that,” Baillet said. “The good news is that they are (coming after our employees). I think we have the best developers. If they were not coming after us, I would be suspicious.”
Brassard said gaming companies now focus much more on recruiting and retention of employees than they did in the past.
When he started in the industry in the late ’90s, he was the lone recruiter working in Ubisoft’s human resources department. Now, Baillet said, Ubisoft has a team of eight people just working on recruiting.
“Every company seems to have a big department just looking at recruitment,” Brassard said.
While there are a few public stories of poaching, Brassard said he believes there isn’t a huge retention problem in the industry.
“People are very dedicated to their projects,” he said. “They’ll often wait until the end of the project to start looking for something else. There aren’t many floaters.”
jmagder@montrealgazette.com
Twitter: @JasonMagder
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