Frima's Steve Couture and Jake Theis

The kind of acquisition we can make, if they are based on IP, that would be more to continue the operation of that IP itself instead of trying to produce as work-for-hire.

Honestly, as an entrepreneur it would have been totally different. Some people think these kind of incentives are their just to put pressure on the market. We use these incentives to grow the business, we employ 260 people in Quebec city where a few years ago there were about 50 people working in the industry. It brings companies like Ubisoft to the city, Activision, us and some other independent studios. And also the ancillary support businesses for the games industry - animators, sound and music, bug tracking, localisation.

It creates an ecosystem that is positive and powerful. It's now possible in the province to find really senior people, because for 10 or 12 years the industry is at an international level. So it generates a super-nice industry. Without these incentives the industry would be different. As an entrepreneur I would have managed things differently. These incentives are connected to full-time jobs, not for sub-contractors. When you start any business it's a good thing to hire people and sub-contract and take less risk.

With these incentives I was more willing to take the risks to have someone paid for the year, but if we have someone over in production we're able to keep them on. It creates real value in the region and we reinvest. We are still 100 per cent private company. There's no VC at Frima, we're still the same three co-owners and we earn more than 90 per cent of the business. That would have been totally different without the incentives. But then on the other side of that, Quebec is not a venture capitalist place. There's not many investors. Probably without the incentives I would have gone to American VCs. It sounds like the best place in the world to start a business but there are some things missing in the ecosystem. We shine brightly if we compare to others. For two years we were the fastest growing company in Quebec and the tenth in Canada so we've grown rapidly.

I think the tablet technology is amazing. Looking at the iPad 2 announcement and the $500 price point... there are 15 million units of the original iPad out there and with that nice attractive price point I think there's going to be a lot of tablet gaming out there. Social is really big and robust. It's interesting that I've heard a lot of people say that it's so hard to compete because you have the dominant companies at the top end. But to be the 500th most popular game on Facebook - in terms of monthly active users - you can still have a really dedicated community and have a nice little business, and launch brands on Facebook pretty simply and straight forward.

Kinect is also something that's really exciting to us, that's something we're also trying to figure out.

One of the things I think that is the most exciting opportunity on Kinect is to create a new brand in that space. One of the issues that the Wii had initially before Nintendo started to launch cornerstone titles, was that the brand was the platform - Wii Sports, Wii Play. The brand was the platform. With Kinect and our growing relationship with Microsoft, hopefully we'll be able to launch brands in there - people's first reaction to a property in Kinect is something I'm curious to see. Kinect and downloadable has got a lot of potential.

Beside the platform and the technology, a lot of people are talking about metrics and game design. We're born of that industry six years ago when we built our first kids MMO and we know about managing maintenance, we have a proprietary dashboard so we know about managing stats. To get granular on stats, on behaviour, on purchase, habits around people and how they interact within the game - you try not to get caught in paralysis by analysis, because there's an overwhelming amount of data, it can be intoxicating.

As a company that launched A Space Shooter For 2 Bucks and I don't think we've ever shipped a physical copy of a game, it's a huge, huge market opportunity. If you want everyone that has the capacity to play a game to touch it, if you aren't able to offer it for a compelling price point, then your competitor will. Unless you can get everyone to collude on prices, well, no one's going to do that - someone's always going to see the opportunity in delivering what the customer wants.

You need to have intellectual property that can stand out from the pack. If 13 farm games come out in a row in the social space then I would agree with him, but if you come out with something that is strikingly different that you can navigate through, I think there's tremendous opportunity.