Game Development Company in Montreal

Montreal game budgets are best read after the tax credits, not before: a scoped indie mobile or PC prototype over six to twelve weeks, a full indie title in the Compulsion Games or Sabotage Studio tradition as an eighteen to thirty-month build, or AAA work-for-hire engineering inside Ubisoft Montreal, EA Montreal, WB Games Montreal, or Eidos-Montréal pipelines. Every proposal is modelled both before and after CTMM and SR&ED offsets are applied, with the CDAE 24% on qualifying IT salaries plus SR&ED 35% on eligible R&D producing effective recovery in the 40 to 50 percent range. Quotes exclude 5% GST and 9.975% QST. We model CDAE and SR&ED offsets in proposals so the net cost of qualifying spend is clear up front.

Le Crédit d’impôt pour le développement des affaires électroniques (CDAE), administered by Investissement Québec, returns 24% on qualifying IT salaries paid to Quebec-resident specified employees engaged in eligible activities including video game development. The federal Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) program returns 35% refundable on eligible R&D expenditure for Canadian-controlled private corporations (CCPCs) up to the $3M expenditure limit and 15% non-refundable above. The two programs stack on the same engineer where SR&ED-eligible work is performed, producing effective recovery in the 40 to 50 percent range on qualifying engineering salaries. This is the most generous game-dev tax position globally and is a primary reason Ubisoft, EA, and WB Games anchored Montreal studios. The Crédit d’impôt pour la production de titres multimédias (CTMM) is a separate Quebec credit specifically for multimedia titles. Final eligibility sits with Investissement Québec and the CRA.

Yes. The Charter of the French Language (Bill 101, as amended by Bill 96 in 2022) requires that products marketed in Quebec be available in French at parity with any other language, with French-Canadian UI, audio where applicable, subtitles, packaging, and marketing copy. The Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) administers compliance, and the Bill 96 amendments materially strengthened enforcement including translation of contracts of adhesion and certain trademark restrictions. Codazz delivers fr-CA localisation (not generic France French, which Quebec audiences reject) for UI, dialogue, subtitles, marketing copy, and storefront descriptions on Steam, Epic, App Store, Google Play, Nintendo eShop, PlayStation Store, and Xbox Store. We coordinate fr-CA voice talent through Montreal voice direction studios and produce the OQLF compliance documentation a complaint or audit would require.

Loi 25 (formerly Bill 64, the Act to modernize legislative provisions as regards the protection of personal information) is Quebec’s privacy law, with phased obligations completed in 2024 including the Privacy Officer requirement, mandatory breach notification, automated decision-making transparency, the right to data portability, and Privacy Impact Assessments for cross-border data transfers. Player accounts, IAP receipts, telemetry, and ad targeting on Quebec-resident players are personal information under Law 25. Codazz keeps player data inside AWS ca-central-1 (Montreal) or GCP northamerica-northeast1 (Montreal) by default to avoid the cross-border transfer PIA, produces the privacy notices Law 25 requires in French and English, and integrates consent flows aligned with the Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec (CAI) guidance.

Yes. Codazz delivers work-for-hire engineering inside AAA pipelines where Perforce, Jira, Confluence, and confidential AAA tooling are the baseline. We have engineers who can drop into Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, Rainbow Six, Watch Dogs, Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, or Gotham Knights-grade pipelines without a multi-week onboarding tax, sign AAA-grade NDAs, work to milestone burndown alongside internal leads, and produce code review that meets internal AAA engineering standards. We do not pretend we are the lead studio on a AAA franchise; we are augmentation engineers who slot into existing Mile End and Le Plateau-Mont-Royal pipelines and produce production-quality output to milestone.

Yes. Dead by Daylight is the Montreal reference standard for live-ops at top-twenty Steam concurrent player load, with seasonal Chapters, licensed IP collaborations spanning Halloween, Stranger Things, Resident Evil, Hellraiser, and more, and a five-year-plus live ops runway. Codazz builds matchmaking, backend, anti-cheat, seasonal content pipelines, and licensed-IP integration tooling at that scale. We design content cadence around seasonal Chapters, build the licensing and integration tooling that lets a Behaviour-style studio onboard a new IP partner in weeks rather than quarters, and integrate Easy Anti-Cheat, BattlEye, or custom server-authoritative anti-cheat on the platform mix the project targets.

An indie prototype targeting Quebec multimedia tax credit-funded production typically takes ten to sixteen weeks from kickoff to a CTMM-ready pre-production package. A full indie title in the Compulsion Games or Sabotage Studio tradition runs eighteen to thirty months from kickoff to Steam Early Access, with another nine to fifteen months to 1.0 and French-Canadian localisation at parity with English. CTMM, CDAE, and SR&ED filings run on the Quebec and federal fiscal calendars and need to be locked into the master schedule from kickoff. Steam, Epic, App Store, Google Play, and console first-party AU and US storefront approval typically add two to four weeks at the end and should be scheduled in parallel with closed beta, not after.

We treat Ubisoft Montreal, EA Montreal, WB Games Montreal, Eidos-Montréal, and Behaviour Interactive as the Montreal reference benchmarks for what good looks like in AAA development and independent live-ops respectively. Codazz delivers work-for-hire engineering and live operations that meet that bar. We have patterned AAA augmentation on the Ubisoft Montreal pipeline standard, live-ops architecture on the Dead by Daylight playbook, and narrative AAA on the Tomb Raider and Deus Ex design lens. If your project would be better served by one of those studios directly, we will say so in discovery rather than overselling capability we cannot match.