BC Business
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At just 45, Rory Armes is arguably the top dog in the universe of electronic games. Having spent two years overseeing Electronic Arts studios in Europe, he returned home last November to take up the new position of group GM, Electronic Arts Canada. From his office at EA’s Burnaby studio, his job is to oversee the 2,000 developers, programmers, testers and others who create electronic games for the industry’s largest producer.
How did you initially get into software? I went through programming at university, and back then games weren’t really part of the schedule – it was more coding big mainframes for boring business applications. It just happens that I’d known Don [Mattrick, former president of EA Worldwide Studios] through social circles – we knew each other from our nightclub days. Other than playing video games in the bar with the rest of the guys when we were supposed to be in university, I did not imagine that it was going to be my career. You just came back from two years with Electronic Arts in England. What exactly did you do there? I went there as GM of our U.K. studio, and over the two years I was there I became a sort of group GM to the U.K., Sweden and EA Montreal. In Sweden we had been working with a company called Dice that did our battlefield franchise, and over about a year and a half we slowly acquired them. I kind of helped Patrick [Söderlund], who is the CEO there, integrate into EA. Montreal was a new studio for us in the last couple of years and so I was just helping Alain [Tascan, GM of EA Montreal] grow his studio. He’s now got three properties going. We’ve heard a lot about Europe’s 35-hour workweek and eight-week vacations. Is that the reality? I found in England they work very hard, but they also manage the work-life balance by not signing up for quite as much stuff. I have 12- and nine-year-old boys, and we seem to have them doing a lot of things. So between work and play we find ourselves very busy here. As for vacations, in Sweden and the U.K. they have quite a bit more vacation time than we do, just by law. When they have the time off, they really seem to enjoy it. What are the responsibilities of your new job? There are three studios in Canada: one is in Montreal, the big one is here in Burnaby and then there’s the downtown one. My job title is group GM, so I’m responsible for everything, whether it’s operations or the financial end. But at the end of the day, my job is to try to influence the creative guys as much as I can in making great games out of these three studios. Are those killer deadlines the gaming industry is famous for ultimately your responsibility? It’s like any piece of product or widget that you have to release. We’re like anyone else; we have a product and we have to finish it based on budget and timing and competition and all that kind of stuff. Lately, we’ve done a good job of questioning whether the product is the product we want to release: can we make it better? Is it the best quality? And whether we have to move the date to get a better quality and to also let teams breathe a little. Do you have a hand in developing the content of the games? I always like to think so, but when you ask the designers and the executive producers of those games, maybe they have a different story. Luckily, I’m a gamer and I’ve been making these games for a long time, so I know how to go into a game team and talk to them about my concepts or my ideas. But mostly I’ll listen to what they’re talking about and I just help them focus. Luckily, I’ve stayed far away from coming in with, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be great if you put that UFO in NHL?’ I’m staying away from giving them my brainstorm ideas. Do you see a parallel between the challenges you face today and what you took on in England? In England, my job was to see if we could increase the size of our development, which I did through acquisition and growth. We’ve got a lot more people here in Canada; we’ve got 2,000 people between the three studios. We’re going to see growth of probably 300 to 400 people in those three studios over the coming 18 months. We’ve been ramping for the next-generation consoles for probably 18 months now and we’re starting to see the growth. As you were packing up to leave England, what did you look forward to most in Vancouver? We were just outside of London and went into London a lot. It’s big and it is busy. There are seven million people living in a space the size of Vancouver to Abbotsford. So you want to get home to a place where you can smell the air, you can see the ocean and you just get a sense of this smaller community. That’s what my family was looking forward to getting back to. We live on the North Shore and I grew up on a ranch, so it was nice to come home to that kind of wilderness. Have you found a home in Vancouver? Luckily, we never left the home that we had here. My wife and I put sheets over our couches and tables and packed up a few things and off we went to England, where we rented everything. So every time we came back, we came back to our house and the kids came back to their toys and their room. So it worked out really well; we didn’t leave the real-estate market only to come back and find it had tripled.