Business
Call of Duty: Gamers Get Inventive
By Blaine Kyllo published Apr 1, 2009
As video-game studios, pummelled by the recession, close shop and lay off staff, an industry recruiter looks to the future
I t’s early yet, so Soho Billiards isn’t busy, even though it’s a Friday afternoon in Yaletown. Two middle-aged men—a bit old for the place—rack ’em up in one corner. Across the room, a group of developers from a nearby Web-design company gang together some tables. Even so, they have to lean over the scattered pitchers and playing cards to make themselves heard above the shouts and the music.
Sitting a few tables over is the organizer of this weekly gathering of members of Vancouver’s beleaguered video-game industry. When the companies that make video games need staff, it’s Jared Shaw they turn to. And when those same companies lay off staff—as they’ve been doing in recent months—it’s Shaw’s company, 31337 Recruiters, they ask for help in placing the newly unemployed.
Shaw, a boyish 32 in jeans, T, and sneakers, keeps these Friday get-togethers informal because he doesn’t want people feeling like it’s “a big recruit fest.” But with the recent layoffs—no one is releasing stats, but Shaw puts the number of unemployed at about 800, some 20 percent of the industry workforce—any gathering of the clan can’t help but feel a bit like a job fair.
A job is certainly on the mind of Chris Concepcion, a 3-D modeller who’s just arrived from Australia. Concepcion had been working for a large developer/publisher down under, heard that the Vancouver scene was vibrant, arranged a working visa, and hopped on a plane. “I guess,” he says with a wry laugh, “I jumped the gun.”
Video games have quietly become a bigger entertainment business than music or movies. A year ago, for example, Grand Theft Auto IV earned $310 million on its first day of release; The Dark Knight,by comparison, brought in an opening-weekend box-office record of $158 million. Locally, there are about 50 studios dedicated to creating game software for computers, for mobile devices such as the iPhone, and for the five gaming consoles: Sony’s PlayStation Portable and PlayStation 3, Nintendo’s DS and Wii, and Microsoft’s Xbox 360. The industry estimates its contribution to B.C.’s GDP at two percent. The people in this room, and their colleagues elsewhere in North America, are responsible for generating $2 billion a year in Canada and $21 billion in the U.S.
