Heavy Rain (of Incentives)

dIn an interview up on GamesIndustry.biz, Heavy Rain developer Quantic Dream's CEO Guillaume De Fondaumiere makes some comments on the effects that Quebec's game development incentives had on the French games industry:

[referring to the French games industry downturn from 2000 through 2005]

"...we've been hit by the distortion of competition - primarily from Canada, from Montreal, which as you know is a French-speaking province. The fact that they created a tax credit worth almost 50 per cent, this has had a big impact in France, and a lot of our creators, developers and programmers went to Canada, so I think we lost more than half of the community to Montreal in those days."

He later goes on to say that France's institution of a similar - but smaller - system helped stem the bleeding.

They don't call it 'priming the pump' for nothin'

There's been a lot of linking to Silicon Knights' Denis Dyack's comments (and subsequent clarification) about the Quebec government's subsidies of game development companies. The clarification was that by labelling them 'insane', he meant 'better than good'.

He still maintains, though, that the subsidies are not maintainable in the long term.

I think he's missing the point. The point was to prime the pump and jump start an industry hot-bed. They've absolutely done so. Now that they have, if the subsidies were to go away, it's not like Ubi and the others would just pack up and leave, would they? There's a local dev community, an infrastructure of schools producing new talent, etc.

I don't think they were ever meant to be sustainable.

There's an argument that they are sustainable (if the delta in growth, new jobs, the taxes those people pay, etc, are enough to fund the subsidies), but that's beside the point.