Alberta’s largest video game developer wants to ‘level up’ and says a provincial tax credit would provide the proverbial ‘XP’.
Bioware, the maker of the award-winning console/PC franchise ‘Mass Effect’, currently employs approximately 350 people at its head office in Edmonton and would like to expand. The company says industry growth in Alberta would be more realistic with the creation of an interactive digital media tax credit.
“We’re very lucky to be doing this in this province,” said Bioware General Manager & VP, Aaryn Flynn.
“Alberta offers a lot of advantages to be here and I just think the high tech industry here is ready to explode with the right government support.”
Currently, British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec all offer a digital media tax credit in some form with varying percentages of wage-based refunds to digital media-based businesses (For example, B.C.’s is 17.5%, Quebec is 37.5%), with restrictions.
“If you modelled the tax credit program after the British Columbia one, you’d be in the $10-million annually (range).”
Flynn, who has had what he calls ‘encouraging’ meetings with current government officials, said he imagines such a tax credit in Alberta would be broad and available to any company producing digital media content.
“To ensure that their costs are well-managed and so they can keep the best talent that they have here in the province,” Flynn said.
“We realized when working with the NDP government that they didn’t know a lot about this industry and we hadn’t done a great job of educating them. So this is all in the spirit of educating them and understanding what the opportunity really could be.”
A recent study showed that between 2013 and 2015, B.C., Ontario, and Quebec created 3,100 full-time jobs in the video game industry. Over the same period, it says Alberta lost 115 full time employees in the industry.
CTV News reached out to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism for comment, and press secretary Marion Nader released this statement in response:
"The government recognizes that the digital media and gaming sectors have tremendous potential for growth in our province. We are developing two new pilot grant programs related to post-production and interactive digital media, that we look forward to sharing details on later this spring. Our government continues to work with the industry to explore opportunities to help this sector grow in Alberta."
Eighty per cent of Bioware’s Edmonton studio staff comes from Alberta, and 20 percent is from outside of the province. Flynn said he’s also had at least ‘half a dozen’ industry employees from the United States reach out to him recently about employment opportunities.
“I think there’s a lot of uncertainty in that country right now. I think there’s a great chance for this province to do well with that,” Flynn said.
Bioware recently completed the fourth entry in the ‘Mass Effect’ series entitled ‘Mass Effect: Andromeda’. CTV News interviewed the project’s Creative Director, scroll up to watch the interview in full.
It is scheduled to be released March 21. Bioware expects to sell more than 5-million copies worldwide.
