Quebec Wants You to Buy Local, and Your Next Game Counts

This summer, the Montreal studio behind one of the most awarded games of the year was reportedly about to be shut down by its owner. Now it is independent, and its boss has a simple ask for players: buy the game.

That story is a pretty good preview of Saturday, November 14, the first Buy a Québec Video Game Day, or Journée j'achète un jeu vidéo québécois. Organized by La Guilde du jeu vidéo du Québec, the non-profit that represents the province's game industry, the event asks players to pick up a game made in Quebec, according to MobileSyrup. The sector has nearly 300 studios and contributes $1.4 billion to provincial GDP. The bigger question underneath it is who owns those studios, and what happens to them when the owner changes its mind.

What is Buy a Québec Video Game Day?

It is a buy-local campaign for games, built around a revamped portal called Jeux vidéo du Québec, or Games from Québec. The site lists more than 400 games made entirely or partly in the province, searchable by genre, studio, platform and age rating. To qualify, a game must have had a significant contribution from a Quebec-based team, La Guilde said in its launch announcement, which also says its members employ 15,000 people.

The list is bigger than most players realize. MobileSyrup points to Assassin's Creed Shadows from Ubisoft Quebec, Dead by Daylight from Behaviour Interactive, the 2023 Dead Space remake from Motive, Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy from Eidos Montreal and The Messenger from Quebec City's Sabotage Studio.

"Our games are often better known abroad than at home," said Chloé Lussier, CEO of Lowbirth Games and the campaign's spokesperson, who name-checked South of Midnight, Sea of Stars and Paralives as titles worth celebrating.

Why does who owns a studio matter so much?

Because it may be the single best predictor of whether that studio survives. Sebastian Cardoso, who has worked at Riot, Crytek and EA, spent about three months tracking 303 PC and console studios acquired since 2000, GamesIndustry.biz reported. One in three has since been shut down completely, and half of those closed within five years of the deal.

The broader picture is grim. By Cardoso's count, 60.8 percent of acquired studios either saw their games decline or were closed outright. Just one in four "came through both producing at or above their old level, as well as institutionally whole." The buyer mattered most. All 17 of Activision Blizzard's ownership periods ended in decline or closure, as did every one under Disney, Midway and Thunderful, while EA's figure was 83 percent.

GamesIndustry.biz notes that some of those results depend on Cardoso's own definitions of decline, so treat the exact percentages as one analyst's census. The direction is hard to ignore.

How exposed are Canadian studios?

Very. The 2024 national industry study from the Entertainment Software Association of Canada counted 821 active studios in the country. About 76 percent are Canadian-owned, yet foreign-owned companies account for 88 percent of industry employment. Quebec alone had 257 studios and 15,220 employees, the largest workforce of any province. The number of companies nationally fell 9 percent from its 2020-21 peak, and the report flags that "some notable closures have hit Canadian subsidiaries."

In other words, most studios are local, but most jobs sit inside companies whose decisions are made somewhere else. Tencent's TiMi Montreal, founded in 2021 to build big-budget open-world games, quietly closed less than five years after it was announced without releasing anything, Kotaku reported.

What happened to Compulsion Games?

Compulsion is the Montreal studio behind South of Midnight, the same game the campaign's spokesperson cited. In July, CBC Arts asked why a studio that had just swept the awards circuit was reportedly closing. By August, management had bought the studio and its staff back from Xbox, regaining the rights to Contrast, We Happy Few and South of Midnight, according to GamesIndustry.biz, citing GamesBeat.

CEO Guillaume Provost was blunt about the alternative. "Compared to all of us losing our jobs on July 6, this is a pretty good deal," he said. He was just as clear about what players can do: "Buying the games is supporting the studio as a result of that change."

Does buying local work if you don't live in Quebec?

Yes, and that is the quiet point of the whole campaign. Buying a game from Edmonton, Halifax or Vancouver sends money to a Quebec studio just as well as buying it in Montreal. The portal is open to anyone, and every listing links straight to where the game is sold.

Ownership math applies coast to coast, too. The same ESAC study counted 146 studios in British Columbia, 276 in Ontario and 68 in Alberta. An independent, Canadian-owned studio lives or dies on sales far more directly than a subsidiary on a parent company's spreadsheet. A purchase on launch week, a review, a recommendation to a friend: those are the signals that keep a small team funded long enough to make the next one.

No single shopping day will reverse decades of consolidation. It can, though, make players pay attention to the credits. Next time you scroll a storefront, check where the game was made and who owns the studio behind it. On November 14, Quebec is betting that you will care about the answer.