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.

Pantsless in Seattle

Finished our taxes last night.

Two surprises:

• A healthy refund. (Between all change of employers, a bunch of financial stuff I did, new baby, etc, I wasn't sure where we'd end up).
• When itemizing all the charitable donations, specifically all the non-cash ones, it turns out that I donated, among other things, no less than THIRTY SEVEN pairs of men's pants! This from going from 36" waist, to 34", to 32" to today's 30". Had to buy new pants several times only to discard a few months later.

It's nice to lose weight, but it's not necesarily cheap either!