CANADA | BETA
SARBAKAN
< factfile > Founded: 1998 Location: Québec City, Canada Number of staff: 115 Current projects include: Dig It Up! (XBLA, Wiiware, in production); Star Fever Agency (casual MMO, online prototype); The Game of Life (RealArcade, PC downloadable); HuruHumi (scenario, virtual world) Key personnel: Guy Boucher (president and creative director); Pascal TessierFleury (VP operations and finance); Dominique Benoît (VP sales and marketing)
Contact email: sara.garneau@sarbakan.com
QUEBEC CITY-BASED Sarbakan is one of the few independents in the publisher studio-dominated province of Quebec, and has managed to hold its
own in a region rife with aggressivelyexpanding rivals in is ten years of business. According to marketing director Sara Garneau, a lot of that has to do with the studio’s casual emphasis. Its 115 staff have worked on a raft of games over the years for a variety of formats – PC and Flash – and have supported a number of developers on games including Wedding Dash 2 for PlayFirst, and Disney Fairies. Current projects include original games Dig it Up for XBLA/WiiWare and a casual MMO called Star Fever Agency, currently in the prototype phase. It also continues to co-develop with other studios or for other big publishers, helping RealArcade with its PC downloadable version of The Game of Life, for instance. And its first DS game Wordmaster was released earlier this year. Not bad for a company that started out in 1998 not as a game developer but as a ‘creative content
studio’ yet has forged a key reputation for itself in the industry since. Work on projects with relatively shorter cycles is better for staff engagement, says Garneau: “At Sarbakan, everyone has the opportunity to get excited all over again about every new challenge. That’s because Sarbakan tackles projects that usually take under one year to complete, projects of varying scopes for varied clients, IPs and platforms. In the world of casual gaming, there’s no doubt that there’s someone you know who plays the games you make, and that makes all the difference.” The studio is split into seven autonomous multidisciplinary cells which manage the entire production of a project in close collaboration with the publisher. “This methodology allows our teams to tackle numerous projects at once while maintaining optimal productivity levels and guarantees that
all games unfailingly meet or exceed their expectations,” she says. But like many Canadian developers in the subsidy-supported Quebec, she brushes off concerns that tax credits are the be all and end all of the territory – and isn’t convinced by the argument that they make a region weak. “The government subsidies played a vital role in kick-starting our industry. They carried new companies during their start-up phase, when venture capital was harder to secure. Serious developers have implemented, over the years, strategies that allowed them to operate without any subsidy. It’s true that some developers used their subsidies to position themselves as ‘cheap labor,’ but they only managed to shoot themselves in the foot and aren’t really competitive anymore; if their subsidies were to disappear, so would they. On the other hand, the developers who produce quality games will continue being successful.”
ENZYME LABS ENZYME LABS was founded in 2002 and, thanks in part to the rise of the Quebec game scene around it, has since grown to become a leading name in multilingual video game testing. The company boasts that it offers a large-scale dedicated multilingual secure facility which “helps video game publishers and developers reduce production costs, enhance the gaming experience and shorten time to release on the market”. Its teams have experience in a variety testing demands, including pre-certification, functionality, linguistic testing, game play, focus group and product evaluation, compatibility, connectivity, MMO load testing and customer support services. Explains marketing director Andre Davignon: “Our studio is structured into teams dedicated to the specific game testing services that we provide. We have specialist and project managers who are responsible for specific projects DEVELOPMAG.COM
“We believe our success comes from our team and that’s why we put a great deal of effort into keeping them happy…”
and functional areas so that we can effectively manage a projects progress and rapidly adapt to any requirements our customers may have. We also promote cross functional training which permits us to be highly flexible in managing our workload.” He also adds that Enzyme differs from other QA firms by keeping a large number of staff in-house. “We value our employees and believe that keeping them happy is the best way to ensure delivering quality to our customers. In addition to on-going training programs, we provide all of our employees with a complete benefits package, access to a games room and two cafeterias. We have a very active social committee that organizes outings, video game tournaments, the corporate soccer team, contests and publishes an internal newsletter. We believe our success comes from our team and that’s why we put a great deal of effort into keeping them happy.”
< factfile > Founded: 2002 Location: Ste Adele, Quebec (Head office) & Montreal, Quebec Number of staff: Over 300 Key personnel: Yan Cyr (president and CEO; ycyr@enzyme.org); Emmanuel Viau (vice-president and COO; eviau@enzyme.org); Sophie Barnaud-Blancheton (business development manager; sblancheton@enzyme.org
Contact email: info@enzyme.org
NOVEMBER 2008 | 41 45