Paris Games Biz Finds Cautious Optimism Under Industry Strain

By Priya Raman

France caps tax relief for game studios at €6 million per year, with diminishing returns above 200 staff, according to Paris Games Biz festival director David Rabineau.

The third Paris Games Biz unfolded in Paris’s 2nd Arondissement while widespread public protests continued. The short walk from the hotel to the venue passed shattered shop windows, soot patches, and melted remains of waste bins and shared bicycles. Dozens of police vans, filled with officers, enforced a curfew around an adjacent area.

Proceedings continued. “They go after a certain type of person,” one local said, adding: “and games people aren’t it.” Inside, publishers, investors and developers expressed guarded optimism about surviving a new business reality, with public funding as a backstop for smaller studios.

Conversations during meetings, breaks and group lunches at nearby restaurants carried the same tone. The choice to eschew stereotypical venue catering underlined the gathering’s emphatically French character. More broadly, the mood echoed the dogged switch to a new business reality seen at Develop Brighton.

The games industry had already endured years of commercial and financial turmoil; civil unrest around Paris Games Biz added a literal metaphor for its pressures. Many small French studios credited government funding initiatives with keeping their businesses afloat.

Attendees had also received backing, or at least rehearsal, from their local industry association before showing games to investors and publishers including Kepler, Krafton, Tencent Games and Kwalee. Those meetings put smaller teams in front of potential funders and publishing partners.

The €6 million annual cap suited indie teams well, Rabineau said, but offered less to larger studios once headcount exceeded 200. Government support in Germany and the UK was more generous, and he was preparing to lobby politicians at Paris Games Week. “Please be mindful, we are fragile and we do bring tax money, please care for us,” he said.

Rabineau contrasted France with the UK’s cluster of AAA (large-budget) studios, including Creative Assembly, Playground and Sumo Digital. France lacks that collection beyond the “behemoth Ubisoft.” The comparison carried weight after recent difficulties at Ubisoft, Nacon and Arkane Lyon, although attendees still counted Team Guillemot’s prospects.

“Ubisoft can be resilient,” said Yves le Yaouanq, CEO of Focus Interactive and a former Rayman executive. He cited “the EA hostile takeover” and “crisis in 2019,” arguing that Ubisoft repeatedly turned around just before falling. Its hinted or showcased next Assassin’s Creed work was, he added, “really risk taking, innovative and interesting.”

Established intellectual property (IP) drew as much interest as new original titles at a well-attended session hosted by Priya Raman, featuring Dotemu CEO Cyrille Imbert and Evil Empire’s Ben Laulan, fresh from the launch of Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse. Both had cautionary tales about losing control of IP, but remained enthusiastic about games whose brands perform much of the marketing work.

Marketing was the discipline attendees most wanted help with. Multiple studios sought publishers for marketing alone, rather than investment or development support. The Game Bakers’ Audrey Leprince argued for skipping even that route.

Her presentation showed Cairn’s commercial success with marketing spend equal to 9% of the game’s total budget. Leprince said much of that spend went to one-and-a-bit staff members dedicated to marketing. The figures positioned Cairn as evidence that a major commercial result did not require marketing to dominate total spending.

Generative AI (automated content generation) remained a major talking point, but the developers interviewed were not using it extensively, even in coding. One indie studio head said: “Our lead coder is the biggest AI hater on the team.” The objection was practical rather than ideological.

Smaller teams’ consensus was blunt: “We kicked the tyres and it didn’t fit our development pipeline.” They were developing emphatically hand-crafted titles. A larger studio head was more enthusiastic about using AI to accelerate prototyping and concept development, but stressed that its use remained controversial and a continuing source of internal team discussion.

Attendees then crossed patches of broken glass to the sprawling Paris Games Week consumer show at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles. Its showfloor was conspicuously thin on previous anchor exhibitors such as Xbox, and rumours circulated that the event could follow E3 or the UK’s EGX into contraction.

What does this change for studios?

For small French teams, public support remains the immediate survival mechanism. The operating choice is narrower: seek marketing-only publisher arrangements when needed, keep budgets lean, and use established IP to move more campaign work onto an existing brand. Above 200 staff, the French cap delivers diminishing returns while German and UK schemes remain richer.

AI’s role is narrower still. Smaller teams rejected it as a fit for their pipelines; larger teams treated it as a possible accelerator for prototyping and concept work, not a settled production standard. For studios, the practical test remains workflow fit rather than blanket adoption.

The next market signal will be whether Paris Games Week can retain anchor exhibitors after Xbox’s reduced presence, with an E3- or EGX-style contraction already being rumoured amid tight money and a preference for fundamentals over spectacle.