Canadian Game Awards want to remind you some of the best video games of 2024 were made in this country
Video game developers, publishers and other industry leaders are descending upon Toronto this weekend for the Canadian Game Awards.
The event’s creator says it’s more important than ever to put a spotlight on Canadians’ huge contributions to video games, which have historically gone unnoticed.
“The movie industry in Canada, and the music industry in Canada, is celebrated a lot. You have the Junos, you have the [Canadian] Screen awards. There’s nothing [similar] for the video game industry, which is crazy when you think about it,” said Carl-Edwin Michel, creator and executive of the Canadian Game Awards.
The show will stream live online at 8 p.m. from the Lightbox, the downtown home of the Toronto International Film Festival, hosted by Canadian presenter Naomi Kyle. It will be preceded by the Eh! Game Expo, where the public can play nominated titles and other games made by Canadian teams.
Award nominees include a mix of big-budget Canadian-made games like Bioware’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard and smaller independent titles like Balatro, the poker-solitaire-like game that became the indie hit of 2024.
Rebuilding the awards show
You could be forgiven if you’re unfamiliar with these awards, as their legacy is somewhat uneven. The event’s predecessor, the Canadian Video Game Awards, ran for several years in the 2010s before being cancelled in 2016. Michel, who worked on the shows’ latter years, rebooted it as the Canadian Game Awards in 2020 — right as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down live gatherings.
The awards went ahead as online-only shows, before the first in-person event in 2023. But it was marred by malfunctioning Teleprompters and other technical glitches.
Michel says his team took 2024 off to improve their next show — and, frankly, to rebuild trust in the local gaming communities that the CGAs were still viable.
“The last iteration of it … wasn’t a great show. [Michel’s] the first to say it. You know, he’s taken responsibility, he’s done the mea culpa tour,” said Paul Fogolin, CEO of the Entertainment Software Association Canada and a partner on the awards.
“I’m cautiously optimistic that this show will be much better than the last…. And if this goes well, then it’ll only build up from there, right?”
Michel, Fogolin and Canadian game developers agreed that despite the show’s growing pains, it’s more important than ever to have a show like this to promote games made all or in part in this country.
Many of the industry’s most popular games are in fact made entirely or in part in Canadian studios. International publishers, such as Ubisoft or Electronic Arts, count Canadian studios as among their largest.
“People don’t know that … FIFA (now EA Sports FC) has been created here, or a big portion of Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed are being made here in Canada,” said Michel.
“The first reason to do this [awards show] is to shed light on the community, making sure that people understand that we have a thriving industry here in Canada, and we need to celebrate it.”
Balatro, a card-based video game, was made by a single developer from Saskatchewan. It took home the best independent and best mobile game at this year’s Game Awards, and was nominated for game of the year. The CEO of the Saskatchewan ESports Association also reviews other games that made their mark.
Made in Canada, published by international corporations
This year’s awards come at a contentious time. A looming trade war with the United States, including tariff threats from President Donald Trump, has triggered a wave of support to buy Canadian-made goods and support Canadian products and businesses.
It’s a trickier proposition when it comes to video games.
“The Canadian games industry and the American games industry are sewn together 100 different ways,” said Ben Gelinas, creator of Times & Galaxy, which is up for best narrative at the CGAs.
Canada’s games industry is a hotbed of independently owned studios. But its biggest offices are owned by international corporations like Electronic Arts and Ubisoft.
Michel told CBC that complication factored into what games were eligible for nomination. Venezuelan Canadian actress Humberly Gonzalez was nominated for best performance for her leading role in Star Wars: Outlaws. But the game itself couldn’t net other nominations, because while Ubisoft’s Toronto office contributed to it, it was led by their studio in Sweden.
Gamers don’t care where it’s made
Add to that a gamer culture that is less interested in the real-world origins of their favourite games than the fantastical worlds they parachute into.
“I think your average gamer isn’t all that concerned about where their game comes from,” said Scott Christian, a Toronto-based developer and lead behind game of the year nominee Lil Guardsman.
This lack of awareness paradoxically makes gaming “a borderless industry,” said Christian, which might make games media outlets and influencers more likely to cover Canadian-made games.
That’s especially important as the Canadian market alone isn’t big enough to keep their operations afloat, several developers told CBC.
But it also makes games with explicitly Canadian settings and themes a tough sell internationally. Of the CGAs’ five game of the year nominees, only one is set in a recognizably Canadian locale: Été, an artistic travelogue of Montreal.
To Gelinas, it can be a hard sell domestically as well.
“I think it’s harder to try to interest people in Canadian stories outside of Canada. It is also a hard sell in Canada. This is my opinion, but we’re a group of people who don’t really like to hear our own stories as much, and tend to sort of roll our eyes at them sometimes,” he said.
Even if a studio in Canada may not be making Grand Theft Auto: Toronto any time soon, developers are finding ways to tell stories from their uniquely Canadian points of view, no matter the setting.
“I don’t know how much it matters to people outside of Canada, but I think it’s a nice thing to find ways to recognize that these things are being made in Canada … especially Canadian indie games, [which are] definitely part of Canadian cultural output,” said Remy Siu, founder of the Vancouver-based Sunset Visitor, the studio behind fellow game of the year nominee 1000xResist.
“I see Canadian games really not only punching above their weight, but kind of pushing the boundaries [of the medium] in, I think, nuanced and interesting ways,” he said.
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