Paris Games Biz 在动荡面前展现了一种谨慎的乐观，无论是本地还是整个行业 | 观点

The sentiment ahead of Paris Games Week was of finding success in a new business reality, backstopped by government funding for smaller studios

The games industry has spent several years persisting in the face of commercial and financial turmoil; to that it has now added civil unrest as a small group of publishers, investors, and developers gathered for the third Paris Game Biz in a city still undergoing widespread public protests. The short walk from hotel to the venue in the 2nd Arondissement was studded with shattered shop windows, soot patches and the melted remains of waste bins and shared bicycles; the official party took place with dozens of police vans parked outside, packed with officers there to enforce a curfew that, fortunately, encircled an area just beyond.

The police did not interrupt proceedings – "they go after a certain type of person," said one local, carefully, "and games people aren't it" – and the event continued despite the turmoil elsewhere, a rather heavy-handed metaphor for the industry at large. In conversations in meetings, breaks, and the group lunches at nearby restaurants – eschewing stereotypical venue catering to underline this was an emphatically French undertaking – the tone was of cautious optimism, echoing the same dogged switch to a new business reality we saw at Develop Brighton.

It was notable the degree to which this rested on the various government funding initiatives that many small French studios freely credited with keeping their business afloat during rough times. Many of those present had been funded, or at least drilled, by their local industry association to show their games to a collection of investors and publishers including Kepler, Krafton, Tencent Games, and Kwalee.

That tax relief is capped at €6M a year, festival director David Rabineau points out, which suits indies just fine, but means diminishing returns for big studios who go beyond 200 staff. The support offered by the governments in Germany and the UK is much more generous; Rabineau was preparing to lobby politicians at Paris Games Week for more support: "Please be mindful, we are fragile and we do bring tax money, please care for us." He sees the UK's collection of AAA studios like Creative Assembly, Playground, and Sumo Digital as something that France lacks, aside of course from the behemoth Ubisoft.

The latter's recent travails were not lost on the attendees, nor were the similar struggles of Nacon and Arkane Lyon, although nobody was counting Team Guillemot out. "Ubisoft can be resilient," says Yves le Yaouanq, currently CEO of Focus Interactive, but who like many French executives did his time under the Rayman banner. "There was the EA hostile takeover, crisis in 2019… very often, Ubisoft managed, right before the fall, to turn around. Some of the things they've hinted or showcased, like the next Assassin's Creed, are really risk taking, innovative and interesting."

While many of the studios present were there to pitch new and original titles, there was considerable interest in working with existing IP, as demonstrated by a well-attended session I hosted with Dotemu CEO Cyrille Imbert and Evil Empire's Ben Laulan, the latter fresh from the launch of Castlevania: Belmont's Curse. While both had cautionary tales about what can happen if you don't control the IP, both were enthusiastic about the potential for building games where a big chunk of the marketing work is done simply by the brand.

Marketing seemed to be the discipline that most attendees wanted help with. Multiple studios were seeking publishers for marketing only, rather than investment or development support - although The Game Bakers' Audrey Leprince advocated for skipping even that, with a presentation that showed Cairn's huge success was backed by marketing spend that only represented 9% of the total budget, much of which was spent on one-and-a-bit staff members dedicated to it.

The other great talking point of the moment, generative AI, was not being extensively used by the developers I spoke to, even for coding work – "our lead coder is the biggest AI hater on the team," one indie studio head told me – although not with any particular animus. We kicked the tyres and it didn't fit our development pipeline, was the consensus among the smaller teams, most of whom were developing emphatically hand-crafted titles. The head of a larger studio was more enthusiastic about using AI to accelerate prototyping and concept development, but emphasised its use remained controversial and a source of ongoing discussion within the team.

As the event concluded, many attendees navigated the patches of broken glass on the way to Paris Games Week, the sprawling consumer show in the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles. But there, too, clouds were present: the showfloor was conspicuously light on previous anchor exhibitors like Xbox, and there were rumours that it may soon go the way of E3 or the UK's EGX. For all the cautious optimism, money remains tight, with a focus on fundamentals over spectacle.