Now in its fifth year, Toronto Canada’s XP Game Summit–a sister conference to the long-running Montreal International Game Summit–offered a unique opportunity to take the temperature of a Canadian games industry that, as in other regional industries, has found itself battered by the winds of change. 

Despite doubling in size between 2013 and 2022, the industry has suffered recently due to what some have argued is an outsized emphasis on generous tax incentives slanted towards triple-A multinationals with little oversight or protection for workers. In recent years, this has meant the industry has seen seismic studio closures and layoffs, with Embracer group shutting down Onoma (once Square Enix Montreal) and Ubisoft closing Ubisoft Halifax shortly after the studio unionized (although the company claims there was no connection).

It’s no surprise then that at the XP Summit, attendees were bearish on the future of triple-A development in Canada. What might surprise some is that despite this, the mood at XP Game Summit was optimistic: couched in the recognition that the global games industry has changed drastically due to the “pandemic hangover.”

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