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New Yaletown studio of Seattle-based online casual video games giant is using the allure of the marketplace’s fastest growing segment to recruit local talent Curt Cherewayko Following the close of one of the largest rounds of venture financing in the history of the United States’ video game industry, a Seattle-based casual video games developer has established a studio in Vancouver, its first outpost beyond Seattle. The opening of a 4,500-square-foot facility in Yaletown signals the first step in Big Fish Games’ global expansion, which is being fuelled by a US$83.3 million financing that the company completed this month. “After a lot of examination and looking literally around the world, we’ve landed in Vancouver,” said Jeremy Lewis, Big Fish’s president and CEO.
The company has four employees in its Yaletown space so far. It’s recruiting 20 to 30 core engineers and game developers in 12 to 18 months. “Vancouver has an incredible base of professionals in both those areas,” said Lewis, who was in Vancouver with other executives to debut the company to the local video game community during this month’s Spark Animation Festival. Unlike Redmond, Washington’s Microsoft Corp., which recently opened a development centre in Richmond to skirt a law that limits the recruiting of foreign professionals in the United States, Big Fish, according to the company’s vice-president of human resources, will recruit professionals from B.C. “Our impetus for B.C. is not based on visa status,” said Peter Anderson. “As we grow as a global company, we’re looking for international talent-bases, and that’s what exists in Vancouver. We will build out our Canadian facility with the Canadian talent that is there.” The company’s financing was led by London’s Balderton Capital, which will be Big Fish’s European point man as the company looks to expand in Europe. Big Fish has been profitable since its founding quarter in 2002. Its sales of US$50 million annually are driven by the growth of the US$2.25 billion casual video game market. With 310 employees in Seattle, Big Fish develops roughly a dozen titles per year at its studio and has a network of 600 developers who receive a slice of the revenue from games they develop for Big Fish’s five web portals. Mystery Case Files, its most successful title, has been downloaded by more than 100 million people. Core or enthusiast games – which still dominate video game development in B.C. – are more complex than their casual counterparts, which tend to maintain the simplicity of arcade games like Pac-Man. Big Fish joins other casual game developers that have arrived in Vancouver in recent years. Nexon Publishing NA, a division of South Korean online casual gaming giant Nexon Corp., opened a studio in Vancouver in 2006 – its first studio outside of South Korea. In July 2007, PopCap Games, another Seattle-based casual game developer, acquired Vancouver’s SpinTop Games, which continues to develop casual games here. In the core game space, Emeryville-based Foundation 9 Entertainment recently closed its Vancouver-based Backbone Entertainment studio, which, according to Foundation’s website, employed 90 people. “We’ve decided that it makes sense to centralize the efforts of our two Backbone Entertainment studios under one roof,” a representative of Foundation 9 told BIV in an e-mail. Anderson pointed out that the market for casual games is growing far faster than the market for core games. He said Big Fish will try to draw talent from local core game developers and noted that casual games appeal to engineers and programmers because they have shorter development cycles. “Instead of working on a game for two years that may or may not launch, you can work on a game for three to six months that instantly launches, and you know how its doing within a couple of weeks.” •
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