When you press start on most video games, you often find yourself in the shoes of a protagonist tasked with saving the world. The stakes are only slightly smaller for George Greer.
Greer is the co-founder of Besszong, a new Halifax-based independent video game development studio founded out of the ashes of Ubisoft Halifax’s closure earlier this year. The struggling publisher is just one of many major game studios to shutter operations in the region in recent years. Now Greer wants to replace it.
“Without sounding too full of myself, we would like to become one of the major game developers in the region.”
“We want to build something that is from here, and we want to build it in a way that we can achieve a level of success and expansion that is enough to support a community of game developers within the Atlantic region,” Greer told BetaKit in an interview earlier this month. “Without sounding too full of myself, we would like to become one of the major game developers in the region.”
Some notable recent studio closures in Atlantic Canada include Halifax’s Alpha Dog Games under the Microsoft-owned studio Bethesda (creator of popular properties like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout)as well as the shutdown of Electronic Arts’ studio in Prince Edward Island in 2021.
Ubisoft Halifax continued the trend in January by putting 71 people out of work, including Greer, just weeks after employees unionized. The studio had been working on mobile game spinoffs for two of Ubisoft’s flagship franchises inAssassin’s Creed Rebellion and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Mobile, as well as an unannounced “experimental” game that tied into other Ubisoft projects.
“The team that we’ve built is the survivors of the closures in the recent history of major Atlantic Canadian studios,” Greer said. “These people are all extremely experienced.”
CWA Canada, the union representing the Ubisoft workers, filed a labour complaint accusing the French gaming company of closing the office to quash the union, demanding proof of the financial troubles claimed to be behind the closure. Ubisoft and CWA eventually reached an undisclosed settlement, which Greer gave no details on, but said: “the collection of us were happy with the result.”
The settlement spelled the end for Greer’s seven years at Ubisoft, but seeded the beginning of something new. Greer said Besszong’s nine-person team is working on a volunteer basis to be eligible for employment insurance while the studio courts funding from public institutions like the Canada Media Fund, the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, a publisher, or even a loan.
“We’re hoping to find some level of partnership somewhere out there, but we’re just trucking along in the meantime,” Greer said.
This isn’t an uncommon practice in the games industry. Even outside of Atlantic Canada, employment opportunities in gaming can be turbulent as studios close or get absorbed, and many developers hop from gig to gig, starting their own projects in the meantime. The best example for this, Greer says, is 2025’s Game of the Year, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a turn-based role-playing game created by a French team of former Ubisoft developers.
“Some of the biggest successes in the industry have come from people who have left Ubisoft to make individual projects,” Greer said. “We’re really hopeful that we can be in the same realm as those people.”
Coming out of community college for animation, Ubisoft was Greer’s first job in the games industry. Now he wants to create those opportunities for others. Besszong asked community colleges in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick if it could take on students as interns, to which the colleges said, “take as many as you can.”
“A core piece of our proposal to the community is that we want to enable some kind of homegrown talent,” Greer, who was wearing his Ubisoft crewneck, said. “They [the student interns] have been doing fantastic work. I’m totally blown away by their work.”
RELATED: Union files labour complaint, demands details from Ubisoft after sudden Halifax studio closure
Despite Greer’s experience developing mobile games for Ubisoft, that’s not the route he wants Besszong to take for its first game. Greer explained that, while at Ubisoft, multiple attempts to break into the hyper-casual mobile market were “so incredibly unsuccessful” that only one game of 10 even made it past the finish line.
Instead of targeting that “saturated” and competitive market, Besszong is developing a party game for the PC set in Atlantic Canada, using the region’s natural landscape as a backdrop. It’s not the grand world of Expedition 33, and the game is still going through design iterations (namely, between supporting four or six players), but the prototype now has a functioning multiplayer mode.
“Anything and everything can change,” Greer said of the game’s development. “There’s a lot of work that still needs to be done, both in design-wise and in making the actual game.”
The hope is that the game does well enough to make a version for the Nintendo Switch. If it does even better, it might even make it to mobile.
Feature image courtesy Besszong.