Leaders at Interactive Arts Alberta and the Walkthrough Collaborative Centre are launching an accelerator that offers $25,000 for video game studios called Baby Ghosts Alberta, hoping to share the lessons they learned while participating in the Baby Ghosts peer accelerator in Toronto.
"Baby Ghosts is focused on marginalized developers, but also on worker-centric values and the cooperative style," Madison Côté, the executive director of Interactive Arts Alberta, told Taproot. "It provided us time to actually focus on the studio itself, rather than rush (out a game). There are a bunch of accelerators where their milestones are, 'Have you hit this point in production? How close are you to release?' But they don't care how healthy the dynamic of the team is. They don't care if you're going to make it past your first game."
Over six months in 2023 and 2024, Côté participated in the Baby Ghosts accelerator as part of Cohort 3. Côté worked there on Cozy Comet Games alongside Derek Kwan, her colleague at both the worker-cooperative game studio and IAA. The next year, Côté and Kwan acted as peer mentors for Baby Ghosts Cohort 4.
Now, the two are partnering with Baby Ghosts to launch Baby Ghosts Alberta, which will run from late fall through April. The accelerator offers peer- and mentor-based learning, and participants receive a $25,000 stipend as they work on their game. Côté and Kwan want to include at least four independent studio teams that include people who are Indigenous, Black, racialized, ethno-religious minorities, persons with disabilities, or from 2SLGBTQ+ communities. Applications for Baby Ghosts Alberta will open in September, and the accelerator will begin in either late October or early November.
Côté said the accelerator is especially needed right now because game studios need support. Though created by ex-pats from the Edmonton success story BioWare, both Inflexion Games and Humanoid Origin have rolled out layoffs, or completely shut down, respectively.
"The past few years have been pretty tumultuous for the games industry," Côté said. "A lot of studios have either collapsed or been acquired, so the big focus for us is quality, studio sustainability, and resilience."
Côté and Kwan told Taproot about crunch culture and burnout in the video game industry when launching Walkthrough, their coworking-esque space on Whyte Avenue for indie game developers. Walkthrough will host part of the Baby Ghosts Alberta programming here in Edmonton, though studios from anywhere in Alberta can apply. The accelerator is predominantly in-person to better foster collaboration, Kwan told Taproot.
A major part of the curriculum is about autonomy from corporate acquisition, which runs contrary to the conventional "success" narrative. "A lot of what we're trying to do with the accelerator is to create a pathway for founders, for people who own their own intellectual property, to not have to sell (their IP) in order to survive," Kwan said. "(We want to support) the local industry that will be that foundation for the growth of other studios."
Kwan said the Canada Media Fund's Changing Narratives Fund is supplying about two-thirds of the funding for Baby Ghosts Alberta, while the province is supplying the rest through the Northern and Regional Economic Development Program. He added that IAA is working on one more potential funder so it can have five studios in the accelerator cohort rather than four.
Beyond Baby Ghosts, there are other mentorship programs for game studios in Edmonton and Alberta. Edmonton Screen has the Summit Push Program and The Trailhead Program; the Scaffold Institute, meanwhile, offers a Venture Acceleration Program, and the GameCamp Edmonton Game Developers Association has a variety of programs.