Lara Croft lives here

>>The arrival of British game developers Eidos
may shake up Montreal’s increasingly crowded labour market

LOOKING FOR LOCAL TALENT: Stéphane D’Astous

by ERIK LEIJON

At an indeterminate time this spring, and in an as-of-yet-unknown location, Eidos, the largest video game publisher in the U.K., will be the latest big-name developer to set up shop in Montreal. At a press conference last month attended by Eidos’s chief technology officer Julien Merceron, SCi (Eidos’s parent company) commercial director Bill Ennis, Quebec economic development minister Raymond Bachand and president of the Montreal executive committee Frank Zampino, the house that Lara Croft built outlined their rough vision of Eidos’s seventh and largest studio to date.

The plan is to create only next-generation consoles, AAA titles (a vague industry term associated with games with larger budgets and bigger development teams) and to create new intellectual properties at a centralized downtown office with easy access to public transportation. Eidos also wants 110 employees by the end of the year (including 30 testers) and 350 within three years. The testing group will perform quality control for all of the publisher’s games, not exclusively the Montreal titles.

At the press conference, Stéphane D’Astous was unveiled as general manager of Eidos Montreal, and will now begin the process of finding a home and workers.

“I would say with past history, 80 per cent [of our hires] could come locally,” he says. Known primarily for their buxom cross-platform star Lara Croft and her cave-exploring adventures in the Tomb Raider series, Eidos has also published the Hitman and Deus Ex games. D’Astous says Eidos Montreal will only be developing for the three major consoles (Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3), and there are no plans for PC, DS or PSP games.

Credit the tax credit

Montreal was the only Canadian city considered and ultimately beat out an unnamed locale in south-east Asia. Ennis cited “pro-active” measures by the provincial government and economic development agency Invest Quebec as being the primary reason for choosing the city. The government gives a refundable tax credit of up to 30 per cent of eligible labour expenditures, and an additional 7.5 per cent for making French-language versions.

D’Astous’s involvement began at the Montreal International Game Summit (MIGS) last November. Eidos and the British-based SCi were already looking to create a new studio and had been approached by Invest Quebec two years prior. D’Astous met former Ubisoft colleague Julien Merceron (who worked in France when D’Astous was here) and they set up the exploratory meetings. The announcement and plan were set up in only a few weeks, but D’Astous said it was pivotal to get the ball rolling quickly in order to find quality artists in the competitive industry.

“We wanted to create momentum,” especially in the lead up to this week’s Game Developers’ Conference in San Francisco, says D’Astous. “We had a communication plan, and the earlier we started the plan, the better it was because our goal is to have our first project ready for Christmas of 2009.” With their plans for an 18-month minimum development cycle, getting started this year could mean having their first product ready in the summer of 2009.

Watching Ubisoft’s toes

D’Astous’s past with Ubisoft recalls the last big player to come to Montreal, Electronic Arts. Its arrival in 2003 was controversial because Ubisoft sued five former artists who jumped ship to join Alain Tascan, a former Ubisoft employee who became general manager at EA Montreal. Employees at Ubisoft Montreal are required to sign a non-compete clause, meaning they are unable to work for another video game company in North America for a year if they leave the company. D’Astous says his departure from Ubisoft after a three-year tenure, prompted by a change in management, was amicable, and his severance included the removal of the non-compete clause.

But with a major need for workers, D’Astous was coy about being tempted to draw from his old well; he admits he was responsible for recruiting a lot of employees during his time there. “What I can say is we’ll put together a very interesting package for the employees. Only AAA titles, only next-gen, with an extended production cycle and limited teams. With those four factors, we’ll attract people, so I won’t refuse people who want to work for us.”

In the EA lawsuit and in another case in 2006 involving Ubisoft Montreal’s former chief operating officer Martin Tremblay, who switched to Vivendi Universal Games, the Quebec courts upheld the clause and prevented the workers from changing companies until the year expired.

Eidos is hiring. Send CV’s to jobs.montreal@eidos.com.