Quebec: Beautiful city, a development powerhouse and an inspiring games community

Development model marketing attaches to something sturdier. It is built alongside development rather than bolted on at the end, and it is organised around the milestones the game itself passes through. Marketing becomes a participant in the roadmap and a valuable lens to shape it. Alongside speakers on pitching and long tail commercial planning and execution, it was a solid and well-planned programme of talks.

Interestingly a lot of developers in attendance are seeing the same challenges and opportunities in games marketing that our clients see across Europe:

• Instagram continues to do the work, delivering more strongly in a lot of cases. Enough so that I might stop treating it as the dependable second and start treating it as the one that could carry you.

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• Targeted showcases and festivals are beating the tentpoles. A well-chosen, relevant event often does more for an indie developer than a NextFest moment. The big events are pitched as the shot you wait all year for. For many small teams they are simply not the best use of a finite budget and finite attention.

• Gamescom is too noisy. I will say it plainly, because few people do. For indies, much of the time, it is an expensive room where you shout into a crowd that is also shouting. Go for the business.

• The gap between the beats is the key. Your calendar and your regularity matter enormously. Wishlist run rate and community engagement are built in the moments between, steady and unglamorous weekly output.

• And the oldest truth: You need a clear and compelling concept. You need to sell the fantasy before you sell the systems. Players fall for a world, a feeling, a promise. They come for the vision and stay and play for the systems.

None of this is new really or even surprising but knowing these truths are relatively universal is strangely comforting.

On Québec

Canada is a powerhouse, and Québec is one of the jewels in its crown. The big studios there have built an enormous wealth of talent, and that talent has not stayed locked inside them. It has spilled out into a real community of strong, collaborative teams.

What struck me is how people there talk to each other. Collaboratively, openly and with a genuine pride in and understanding of regional strength.

Québec and its neighbour Montreal have been host and incubator for names like Gearbox, Behaviour Interactive, Ubisoft, Beenox, Sabotage, Fika, Polymorph, Hatchery, Nine Dots and many more with some large and luminary names alongside some small-yet-mighty studios making interesting, high-quality games with an openness and spirit that I found truly inspiring.

Québec has been quietly and humbly doing something remarkable for a long time, and it was a pleasure to stand in a room full of people who are so good at it and so generous with each other.

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