Inside Canada's Talent War

Talent poaching within the Montreal community was given a public face last year following the departure of Ubisoft creative director Patrice Desilets for THQ. Ubisoft was awarded an injunction against THQ in January after Danny Bilson told Joystiq that the company had secured a further three people from Ubisoft at Desilets' request. Allegedly, that wasn't enough to deter THQ, and shortly after Ubisoft discovered that another former employee, Adolfo Gomez-Urda, had offered other Ubisoft staff significant pay rises to leave. A second injection was issued at the end of March.

According to Eidos Montreal general manager Stephane D'Astous there is a "critical mass" of developers in the city, and talent poaching is widely seen as a growing problem. "Definitely. To put things in perspective, Ubisoft has been in Montreal for nearly 15 years, and in that time the non-compete clause has always been there, and in that time it has been applied three times."

"The first time was when our friends at EA had the good idea to announce publicly that they had recruited five of the core team members of Splinter Cell, and they were saying [thumps chest in overtly masculine fashion]... Obviously, you are provoking at this point, and that wasn't the way we function. The second time was [former head of Ubisoft Montreal] Martin Tremblay, and that was a bad divorce that turned out sour, and thirdly with Patrice Desilets."

I hope we never go there, but a salary spiral, a salary war, might be the beginning of the end

Stephane D'Astous, Eidos Montreal

"I don't know if you noticed when Ubisoft decided to jump into that: it was when somebody from THQ, again [thumps chest] did this, and I was laughing to myself, thinking, 'Why did he say that? Why didn't he keep it low-key, under the radar?' We're at 333 [people] right now. At the start we needed to build a core team, and we had to recruit them from somewhere. But we did it the proper way. There's a proper way and a provocative way."

The Canadian government has lobbied tirelessly to attract new game companies to Quebec, and successfully encouraged local universities and educational institutions to introduce videogame production and design courses. However, it failed to anticipate the vacuum that has formed between the needs of the developers and what the city can reasonably supply. There is now a surfeit of junior candidates, and a chronic shortage of experienced staff.

"The battle in Montreal is the seniors," says D'Astous. "Everybody is scratching and fighting over the seniors. Our plan – and I think it's a logical plan – is to bring our juniors as fast as possible to mid-level seniority, and our mid-level staff as fast as possible to seniors, through masterclasses – very intense one, two, three day classes with masters from all over the world."

The managers of Montreal's various studios are uniting in pursuit of a common solution. An expert from Pixar might be invited to take low-level employees from as many as nine different studios through the company's animation pipeline. Larger developers like Eidos will foot the bill, but D'Astous seems unconcerned about his studio being the sole beneficiary. The goal, as he sees it, is "to bring the floor level higher" for everybody, and in that sense there are "more advantages to come out of it than disadvantages."

Such altruism isn't normally associated with competing companies, and we suggest that the mistrust fostered by public feuds like that between THQ and Ubisoft is surely a threat to the initiative. D'Astous politely disagrees: talent-poaching may be a reality, but the measure of each studio will be evidenced in how they respond.

"If you base your actions on exceptions you won't get much done. These things shouldn't have happened, and there was a reason why they did, but if you want to have a healthy ecosystem you need to be careful, and you need to have respect... Since we've been here three major studios have announced their arrival. I'm not immune to this, and recently other studios have been quite aggressive because they need to build their core team – I've been through it, so I understand."

"But where that applies good pressure is on the management of the studios. If you don't want to go into a salary spiral, you have to scratch your head and come up with innovative ways to keep your staff. I hope we never go there, but a salary spiral, a salary war, might be the beginning of the end."