On July 29, Studio Reset, a three-person team in Edmonton, released a short teaser for The Eventide, its first game, a supernatural mystery set in a neon-noir Canadian city. Players will pick a pair of investigators from a larger cast, and each of them will read the same clues differently, a design the studio calls parallax deduction. All three of the studio's founders came through BioWare, and players can already wishlist the game on Steam while the team looks for the money to finish it.
Sixteen days earlier, in the same city, the Alberta iGaming Corporation had celebrated a launch of a different kind at the Royal Glenora Club, before a crowd of industry partners and government officials. From that day, private operators with provincial approval could offer online casino games and sports betting to adult Albertans, in a market that offshore sites had largely served until then.
Those two summer events show games travelling through Alberta in opposite directions. One kind is made in the province by small teams and sold to players wherever they are. The other has reached the province's adults since the summer through suppliers a regulator has registered, many of them overseas. Following each from the studio to the player shows where the play, and the money, now go.
Edmonton's developers are going independent
BioWare, the Edmonton studio behind Mass Effect and Dragon Age, has long been the biggest name in the city's game industry, and its next few years are hard to read. Its owner, Electronic Arts, went private in a US$55-billion deal led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, and CBC News reported this summer that the US$20 billion of debt behind it had industry watchers predicting major layoffs across the company's studios. BioWare is reportedly working on the next Mass Effect game.
The people are already moving. The founders of Studio Reset started their company after a run of layoffs that reached BioWare and Inflexion Games, the Edmonton studio behind the survival game Nightingale, Taproot Edmonton reported after an Edmonton Startup Week panel on October 7. Kris Schoneberg, Studio Reset's design director, said the three weighed applying to another large studio against a chance to "take the talent that we developed over the last 20 years, and try to found our own thing".
Mark Darrah, who worked at BioWare and EA and now consults through Triage Games, said on that panel that BioWare no longer absorbs all of the city's junior talent, so newcomers have been pushed to make their own games. "Edmonton is in a sad-but-good position right now," Darrah said.
Small teams are the Canadian norm. Of the 821 studios in the latest count by the Entertainment Software Association of Canada, 729 had 50 or fewer employees, its president, Paul Fogolin, told CBC News, and Studio Reset is keeping both its team and its game small on purpose. "We have a niche game for a niche audience, and we're OK with that," said Kaelin Lavallée, its creative director. Lavallée also called the move "pretty risky", telling CBC that large studios no longer offer the stability they once did.
July 13 brought casino sites under provincial rules
Two public bodies oversee the market under the iGaming Alberta Act, which cabinet minister Dale Nally introduced in the spring of 2025. Alberta's gaming regulator, AGLC, registers the operators and enforces the rules. The Alberta iGaming Corporation (AiGC) runs the commercial side of the market, and it signs an agreement with each operator before that operator can open.
Registered sites must offer deposit limits, age verification and self-exclusion, and a player who wants help with gambling from outside the sites can ring 1-866-332-2322, the number for Alberta's 24/7 Addiction Helpline. Dan Keene, the corporation's chief executive, set out the aim at the launch: "This was never about growing the iGaming market, but channelizing and protecting Albertans that choose to participate."
The games on those sites answer to the same regulator, because every supplier behind them has to register with AGLC too. BonusFinder Canada's guide to the best Alberta online casinos deals with Alberta's regulated market, where the minimum age is 18, and explains how AGLC's role as gatekeeper differs from that of AiGC, the operators' commercial partner.
Slot studios sell to operators, not players
AGLC's public register listed 66 companies as providers of critical iGaming systems in early October, the category that holds the slot studios, and 17 as platform providers. The company names on that list read like a map of the industry, with Pragmatic Play, Evolution and Push Gaming registered through Malta companies and Play'n GO through a Hungarian one. Several of the big machine makers appear through Canadian or US subsidiaries.
One registrant, Bragg Gaming Group, trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, so it has to explain how such a supplier earns. Its annual information form for 2025 describes a customer base of "online and land-based gaming operators" and says the company earns "a percentage of the gross gaming revenue generated by the operators". For a supplier like Bragg, the money arrives as its games are played on someone else's site, not when a player buys a copy.
The model supports a sizeable business. Bragg's revenue rose 4 per cent to 106.1 million euros in 2025, and games and content made up 82.4 per cent of its fourth-quarter total, most of it booked in Europe.
The size of the catalogue differs as much as the customer. Bragg counts more than 10,000 casino titles in its portfolio, its own and other studios', while Studio Reset expects finishing a single game to take a few years. A slot is built to sit among thousands of others in an operator's lobby, from a studio that has to clear a regulator market by market.
Steam is crowded, and phones come first
An indie studio sells to players instead, mostly through digital storefronts. The busiest on PC is Steam, and it is crowded: SteamDB, which tracks the store, counted more than 20,000 new games released there in 2025, CBC reported, and 2026 is on pace to pass that. When The Eventide launches, it will have to find players in that crowd without the multimillion-dollar marketing budget of a big publisher.
Some studios sell a game while they are still building it. NovelTeaGames' review of Breakwaters described a five-person studio that had put its survival game on Steam in Early Access, planning to keep developing it in response to player input. In that model, the customer is the person playing, and the feedback comes from the people who paid.
Most Canadian players reach first for something other than a PC, though: the industry association's 2025 survey put mobile devices ahead of consoles and computers.
Alberta's games tax credit lasted one year
Alberta's studios have competed without a games tax credit for most of the past decade. The NDP government introduced a 25 per cent digital media tax credit in 2018, and the United Conservative Party ended it after winning power in 2019, The Logic reported. In that single year, New World Interactive opened a Calgary office and Improbable an Edmonton studio, the team that became Inflexion Games.
Nordicity, reporting for the industry association, put Alberta's game-development workforce at 1,310 full-time employees during the credit year, against 810 in the later count that The Logic cited. In late 2022, Premier Danielle Smith directed Nate Glubish, the minister of technology and innovation, to develop a credit proposal, but in March 2025 the provincial government confirmed it had dropped the plan.
Jonathan Gauthier, Glubish's press secretary, said the province had instead "chosen to support the digital media gaming industry through strategic funding partnerships and investments". Ontario was then offering up to 40 per cent and Quebec up to 37.5 per cent, and British Columbia was set to lift its credit from 17.5 to 25 per cent later that year.
Studio Reset found early backing at the national level. It credits the Canada Media Fund with support in its first stages, and Schoneberg told MobileSyrup that the fund turned the team down the first time before a second attempt succeeded.
The profile of the video game industry that Statistics Canada published in 2025 groups Alberta with Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and it counted 159 game firms headquartered in those three provinces in 2022, up from 74 in 2013. Their revenue roughly doubled over the same years, to $155.5 million, and they had 1,499 jobs between them in 2022, up from 1,333 in 2021 and about one in 40 of the country's game jobs.
Where the money from each kind of game ends up
When The Eventide goes on sale, its revenue can come from buyers wherever Steam sells and pay for a studio in Edmonton; success, its creative director told CBC, means enough sales to keep making games.
A wager on a registered Alberta site starts with a player in the province. AiGC's published split leaves operators 80 per cent of net revenue to cover their costs and sends the province 20 per cent. Read alongside Bragg's filings, the split suggests that a slot supplier's revenue share is one of those costs, so part of what a slot earns there may end up with a studio based abroad.
The corporation spells out the difference itself: with unregulated offshore operators, it says, "funds leave Alberta forever", while the regulated market "ensures a portion of revenue comes right back home".
For Edmonton's studios, Darrah said on the Startup Week panel, the task now is to show that the city is an easier and cheaper place to make games than other markets. They get a showcase soon: Interactive Arts Alberta's first Edmonton Games Week starts on October 18, and its Game Discovery Exhibition conference runs from October 23 to 25.
