Commerce · EN · September 18, 2025

How Video Games Became Quebec's Unlikely Industrial Anchor

In 1997, Ubisoft arrived in Montreal with a promise of 500 jobs and a request for provincial tax credits that Quebec's government, then desperate for private investment following years of political uncertainty, was prepared to meet. What followed was one of the more consequential industrial bets in the province's recent economic history.

The terms were controversial from the beginning. Critics argued that the government was subsidizing a foreign corporation to bring jobs that might have come regardless. Supporters countered that the tax credits were not merely attracting jobs but seeding an ecosystem — that where Ubisoft went, studios, suppliers, and eventually indigenous game companies would follow. Both sides were right, and the tension between those two readings has shaped Quebec's industrial policy discourse ever since.

The critics' case was partially vindicated when the provincial government found itself locked into an escalating subsidy competition with Ontario, which moved to match and eventually exceed Quebec's incentives. The result was a bidding war for studio investment that transferred substantial fiscal resources from provincial governments to foreign-owned multinational corporations with no particular allegiance to any jurisdiction.

What the critics underestimated was the depth of the talent ecosystem that formed in the industry's wake. Quebec's universities — notably Concordia's game design programs and the Université de Montréal's computer science faculty — reoriented curriculum toward game development. A generation of Quebec-trained developers built careers in Montreal studios, some of whom eventually founded their own companies.