Toronto rarely gets credited for video games the way Montreal or Vancouver do. Walk past the old General Electric building in the Junction Triangle, though, and you are standing next to a studio that helped build Watch Dogs Legion and Far Cry 6. The city has been stacking credits for over two decades.
A Studio That Started As a Bet
Capybara Games opened its doors in 2003, when a handful of members from the Toronto chapter of the International Game Developers Association decided to build games together. Nobody wrote a check for millions. The team worked out of spare rooms and shipped Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP in 2011, a title strange enough that bigger publishers would likely have passed on it.
Toronto's habit of testing something small before going all in is not limited to game studios. Casinority's $5 deposit casinos let a curious player sample an unfamiliar table without staking much more than pocket change. That is the same shoestring logic that turned a handful of IGDA members into the studio behind Super Time Force, BELOW and Grindstone.
The Government Bet That Followed
Ontario did not leave the shoestring model to carry the whole city. Ubisoft opened a Toronto studio in 2010, and the provincial government committed 263 million dollars over ten years toward creating up to 800 jobs. That is not a modest ask for a studio with no finished game yet.
Growth looked steady on paper for years.
- 2010: the studio opens inside a former General Electric building in the Junction Triangle
- 2013: staff hits 300 and Splinter Cell Blacklist ships as the debut title
- 2017: headcount reaches 600
- 2018: Starlink Battle for Atlas becomes the studio's first original property
- 2024 and 2026: layoffs of 33 and then 40 employees trim the roster
Press releases only move in one direction. Reality wobbled. Ubisoft Toronto kept shipping recognizable names, Far Cry 5 and Watch Dogs Legion among them, even as two rounds of cuts landed within twenty months of each other. Hard to argue that public money buys permanence.
More Than One Genre, More Than One Postcode
Not every Toronto studio chases triple A budgets or provincial grants. A few smaller shops have found their own niches, often without much fanfare outside game press.
- Torn Banner Studios built Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, a melee combat game that grew out of a student project into an independent studio
- Big Viking Games runs offices in Toronto and London, Ontario, and built its name on FishWorld and YoWorld, both social titles that predate the mobile gaming boom
- Guru Studio developed Fracter, a puzzle title, while also running one of the city's busier animation pipelines
Load up Chivalry this weekend, or open a match from a studio nobody outside Toronto has heard of, and you are playing something stitched together a few subway stops from Yonge and Dundas. Sound familiar? Probably not. Sort of the point.
The Numbers Behind the Postcode
Ontario is home to somewhere between three hundred and six hundred video game companies, depending which count you trust and which year it covers. Statistics Canada put the province at 638 firms in 2022. A newer industry tally from 2025 counts 310. Both figures can be right at once. Firms open, close and get folded into bigger companies constantly in this sector.
The national numbers hold together better. Canada's video game industry reported 821 companies for 2023 and 2024, supporting roughly 34,010 full-time equivalent jobs and contributing 5.1 billion dollars to the economy. Average salary climbed to 102,000 dollars, up 21 percent from the prior report. Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia together account for something like eight in ten of those companies.
Ubisoft Toronto still runs out of that same building in the Junction Triangle, headcount somewhere in the several hundreds after the recent cuts. Capybara Games, two decades past those first spare rooms, still fits on a single floor. Different bets, same postal code, both still standing.
