“My story actually starts with nepotism and wage theft.”
After too many late-night, unpaid shifts at McDonald’s, Chris Entwistle, now head of game product at Artificial Agency and Vice Chairman (North) at Digital Alberta, turned to his programmer brother, who got him a role testing games for Sega.
Walking into that job at 16, he says, felt like discovering where he belonged, suddenly surrounded by people who thought and spoke the same way he did.
From that (merciful) break, he launched a career that has included marquee names in the video game industry, including BioWare, Activision and Xbox. Currently, at Artificial Agency, he is part of a team that builds generative AI behaviour for video games.
“To to give you an idea of what that means,” he explains, “imagine if you had a decision-making engine that can change any part of a game in real time — a character that you can make friends with, or a dungeon master that can change scenarios, or a coach that can teach you how to play the game better — to make it more successful.”
In a word: hyper-personalization.
In his other role at Digital Alberta, Entwistle focuses on helping Alberta’s game industry seize an opportunity that looks very different from the era of blockbuster studios where he began.
Such a career trajectory illustrates a wider point about where innovation in Alberta is heading.
Just as his early break came from networks and collaboration, the province’s next chapter in gaming, and in its broader startup ecosystem, will be defined less by billion-dollar bets and more by smaller, faster-moving teams willing to share knowledge and try new approaches.
Edmonton Startup Week offers a snapshot of this shift, with the Alberta Game Series on October 7 and 8 bringing indie and double-A studios together to show the province’s strengths and signal where the industry is headed.
Smaller studios to the front
“There has never been a better time to be a player,” says Entwistle, pointing out that more than 16,000 games were released on the Steam platform last year alone.
There is, however, a slight wrinkle to this stat.
“It has never been easier to make a game, it’s never been easier to ship a game, but it’s never been harder to get attention for a game.”
That challenge is changing the economics of the industry.
“The world right now is moving away from those big blockbuster hits — those Triple A kind of studios,” he explains. Games that cost $50 million to produce (think Grand Theft Auto or sports league-branded titles) and take five or more years of production, requiring herculean effort and coordination.
“A lot of those bets were made during the COVID era, and they haven’t paid off,” Entwistle says.
“What we’re seeing in the market now is the indies and the double A’s are capitalizing on that, because they can come in at a lower price point. They can get the games out faster. They have a much, much closer community kind of relationship.”
Alberta’s studios fit that model. While the province may not host many triple-A producers, it has a deep bench of independent and mid-tier developers ready to seize opportunities.
Collaboration as a competitive edge
Entwistle believes Alberta’s success will depend less on money and more on how developers connect with one another.
“Imagine a network where I can say, ‘Hey, how do I do this? I don’t want to have to go and learn something for a month. I want to get the answer in a week,’” he says.
Historically, Alberta’s game scene has been fragmented, with organizations pulling in different directions. But that is starting to shift.
“We’ve managed to find a good, strong collaborative message. Everybody wants more sustainable indies and everyone wants a pathway to double-A studios, because that’s where a lot of success comes from,” says Entwistle.
“We have all the pieces here. We just need to find a way to capitalize on that.”
The Alberta Game Series, part of Edmonton Startup Week, is meant to accelerate that change.
Its four pillars — attention, craft, opportunity, and business — are designed to give developers tools to grow and a platform to connect.
“Our job is to essentially capitalize on that,” he says.
Turning Alberta’s talent into a global opportunity
Entwistle points out that Alberta has the right ingredients for growth.
The province has strong post-secondary programs, hundreds of studios, and access to global markets. But success depends on how developers approach opportunity.
“The market is $200 billion a year. The idea that we can’t cooperate is done,” he says. “I want to see Alberta be more successful, Canada be more successful. I think that we can work together to achieve that”.
At Artificial Agency, his focus is on showing what new tools can make possible.
“Let’s take this new technology and be the best in the world at producing games that take advantage of something that we’re building right here at home,” he says.
That same mindset applies across the province.
Just as startups are running leaner and testing ideas faster, game developers are finding new ways to reach players, whether through alternative platforms, fresh monetization models, or building niche communities around their games.
“Often when you tell them [opportunities] exist, developers go, ‘I know what I can do with that,’” Entwistle says. “Most of the time, developers have their heads down building the thing they want to build. So just letting them know, ‘Hey, you haven’t thought of this. How could you use that?’ is 90% of the problem”.
A catalyst for growth
Edmonton Startup Week brings investors, entrepreneurs, and developers into the same rooms. That timing matters, says Entwistle.
“We’re going to have investors and government, entrepreneurs, publishers, all in the city at the same time,” he says. “It creates those very deliberate collisions between people, where people can say, ‘hey, I’ve got this idea and I’m building this thing. Let me show it to you. How do you think we can maybe work together?’”
With all that energy compounded into a single moment, he says, bluntly, “we would be idiots if we didn’t try to capitalize on that.”
“We’re bringing some of the best people in the world to our province to talk about how we can do business together. I would like our game developers to be part of that story.”
For Alberta, the next big game title may not come from a massive studio. The conditions are forming for something different: a generation of smaller studios, linked by collaboration, supported by mentorship, and aligned with the broader shift in how innovation is happening across the province.
Final shots
- The paradox that “it has never been easier to ship a game, but it’s never been harder to get attention” is shaping Alberta’s advantage: small studios that move fast and connect directly with players.
- Mentorship isn’t a nice-to-have. As Entwistle put it, developers don’t always want to dip out to learn a specific skill, if a peer can give them the answer in a week.
- Alberta’s future in gaming depends on pooling knowledge in a $200-billion market where there’s room for everyone.
Digital Journal is an official media partner of Edmonton Startup Week
