With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1505828
34 BCBUSINESS.CA SEPTEMBER 2023 n Tim Bennison has seen a lot over his more than 20 years in B.C.'s video game industry. He knows that it ebbs and flows, that it's a cyclical busi- ness. And, of course, he's been on both ends of layoffs since starting in the sector in the mid-'90s with Vancouver stalwart Radical Entertainment. So he's not exactly surprised by what's C H A N G I N G T H E G A M E How one video game company is thriving through a tough time in the industry taken place in the industry over the last several months, as two of B.C.'s big- gest game studios—Electronic Arts and Relic Entertainment—along with a handful of smaller players, have been laying off swaths of people. "I would say to anyone who has been laid off: hang in there, it happens to all of us, and often great things hap- pen on the other side—you look back and you think, Wow, that was such a good thing for me," says Bennison, who has been chief operating officer at Vancouver-based Hothead Games since late 2020. In fact, Bennison thinks some of those great things might be waiting for people at Hothead. The mobile game company, which has around 65 employees, hasn't been part of the LEVEL UP Tim Bennison, chief operating officer of video game developer Hothead Games, says diversification helped the company avoid layoffs D O N ' T DO IT BY YOURSELF • If Vanessa didn't have a separate full-time career in digital marketing, Johnson thinks their mortgage might not get paid. Still, that other work means she doesn't have the time to participate in the day-to-day operations of the business. • "Doing this all by myself, being more or less the only captain of this ship, is something that I would not do again. I would want to have an operational partner, someone I can rely on, not only to share the burden, but to share successes, to make sure that there's another person checking my decisions," he maintains. "Two heads are better than one, and it can be pretty lonely." COMPROMISE ON QUALITY • Bicycle Pizza was inspired by various classic pizza places. In fact, Johnson's "bible" is a book (Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish, the now-retired owner of Ken's Artisan Pizza in Portland)—and Johnson is not willing to budge on his standards. • "We can cut corners in efficiency, we can schedule better, but quality is non-negotiable," he says. "We're using Vancouver Island-raised meat prod- ucts, we're using great locally roasted coffee, we're making our bread and our dough ourselves, we're making our soups from scratch—we're doing everything right."—R.R. S M A L L B U S I N E S S