The province hosted its first-ever “Buy a Quebec Video Game Day” on Saturday. Montreal has a well-established video-game industry, but it is working through new challenges. From the big names to the smaller games, the Quebec video game industry wants you to buy local. Emilien Roscanu works with the collective known as The Quebec Video Gamers Guild. “The Quebec economy is $1.4 billion annually, so it’s huge for Québec. We have the most workers per capita in the world in our industry,” he said. Fifteen thousand people work in the Québec video game industry, which is struggling through layoffs and dwindling tax credits. “The video game industry in Québec has a lot of challenges, but global challenges, financing, artificial intelligence, the competition for the attention span of people, of players,” said Roscanu. Chloé Lussier is CEO of an independent studio called LowBirth Games. “The last two years have been very complicated. We have had to pivot a little bit on a few things,” she said. These game-makers want Quebecers to know more about the array of great, homegrown games like Hillthorn, a folkloric horror investigation game created by Marie-Eve Beauchemin, who is CEO of Fool Moon Games and says running an indie game studio is tough. “You end up managing a company with, like, people in it and, like, with cash flows and budgets and all those kinds of things that nobody ever talked to you. So, I feel like that’s one of the biggest challenges, honestly, because like when you’re a smaller studio, you need to do everything,” she said. Lussier and Beauchemin both say they are working to level up sales by broadening their audience. “People of all ages and all genders play video games. And that’s an immense opportunity for storytellers,” Lussier said. Storytellers who planted the video game ecosystem in Québec 30 years ago. “We see a huge number of new startups getting started in Québec, and international companies still choose Québec and Montréal and in Québec City, too, to open new doors and new studios because they know that the talent is here. So where we’re at, it’s not the best year, but it’s a good year,” said Roscanu.
