Canadians Doing It Right

I watched a two-part documentary about a video game recently. While how I choose to spend my time should be free of your judgment, a thing worth calling out is the repeated themes from the company involved.

Digital Extremes are based in Canada. Throughout the videos where they talk about company hard times, the repeated messages are about how they can look after their people, and how they can sustain this long term. Success for them is measured in employing a couple hundred souls, making sure there’s a good work environment for them, and being able to sustain this. Communication between them and their fans was more important than having a lot of fans (quality over quantity).

With all the recent megacorp news about companies losing data, or type-A management trying to use you like an ATM, it’s easy to lose sight of the businesses that are trying to do the right thing. Turn a profit, sure, but they’re not being greedy about it. World of Warcraft has millions of subscribers, which one marker for success, but I suspect that DE’s marker for success is more like 500,000 customers, all happy, with DE’s staff able to put food on the table.

You might not be a giant video game geek like me, but there’s happy lessons for everyone in these documentary videos. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to log in now and kill some Grineer.