Meet the best places to work in Canada's games industry

It's not easy to win one of our Best Places To Work awards.

There are two hefty surveys to fill in - one for the employer and another for its employees. Over 2,000 surveys were completed in judging our inaugural Canada awards, with more than 30 companies taking part.

Therefore, we know with confidence that the four winners we revealed today - Beenox, Behaviour Interactive, Ludia and Ubisoft - are all very deserving of this prize.

In an industry where issues such as crunch, stability and culture are coming under increased scrutiny, these awards are designed to highlight the businesses that do it well. We want to throw light not just on the bad working practices that exist in games, but the good ones, too.

The 28 companies that didn't win a badge are not necessarily bad places to work. Far from it, most of them received excellent scores - they just weren't quite high enough to win (in fact, we didn't receive one 'bad' score from any of the participants). Over the coming days, these companies will receive their average employee scores, so that they can identify any areas of improvement. That's what is at the heart of the Best Places To Work Awards - they're designed to make the global games industry a better place to work.

And what about the hundreds of businesses that didn't take part? Well hopefully the winners for 2018 will help inspire some change. Below, we have interviewed each of our winners to find out the secrets behind how they achieve a maintain a happy workforce. This is what they said: