Mon­tre­al’s video-game play­ground just got a lit­tle more crowd­ed.

U.S. devel­op­er and pub­lish­er 2K said Mon­day it’s open­ing a new devel­op­ment stu­dio in the city, its first ever in Cana­da. Devel­op­ers at Cloud Cham­ber, which is the name of 2K’s devel­op­ment stu­dio, will work on the next iter­a­tion of the block­buster BioShock fran­chise.

While 2K isn’t shar­ing exact hir­ing fig­ures, “tons of jobs” will be list­ed, accord­ing to stu­dio head Ken Schachter. A new web­site is being launched Mon­day to kick off the recruit­ment dri­ve.

“The game is going to be in devel­op­ment for the next sev­er­al years,” Schachter told the Mon­tre­al Gazette in a tele­phone inter­view. “There is some run­way to recruit.”

BioShock is a first-per­son shoot­er video game that ranks among 2K’s most pop­u­lar prod­ucts, hav­ing sold more than 34 mil­lion units since its 2007 release. Mon­tre­al will share devel­op­ment respon­si­bil­i­ties with 2K’s Nova­to, Cal­i­for­nia office.

Schachter, a Mon­tre­al native who is return­ing to the city after stints in Toron­to and the U.S., called his lat­est man­date “a dream come true. It’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty to build a new stu­dio and work on the next gen­er­a­tion of one of the most crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed games.”

2K is still eval­u­at­ing var­i­ous loca­tions in Mon­tre­al, which Schachter would­n’t dis­cuss.

In the mean­time, the com­pa­ny has hired “a few lead­ers that will com­prise the core team,” Schachter said. “It is a small group, start­up-style. We’re work­ing from home most­ly.”

With 140 stu­dios, Mon­tre­al is the biggest video-game pro­duc­tion hub in Cana­da and one of the largest in the world. Just last month, Chi­nese pub­lish­er NetEase Inc. said it would look to hire dozens of devel­op­ers after set­ting up shop here.

Com­pa­nies have been drawn to Que­bec’s biggest city by gov­ern­ment tax cred­its, low oper­at­ing costs — com­pared with oth­er North Amer­i­can cities — and an abun­dance of uni­ver­si­ty and indus­try-focused train­ing pro­grams.

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“It’s not just about incen­tives. It’s not just about the tal­ent pool,” Schachter said. “It’s a com­bi­na­tion of the infra­struc­ture, the great schools that are train­ing peo­ple and the estab­lished stu­dios in the com­mu­ni­ty, includ­ing the inde­pen­dent stu­dios. Once you add every­thing up that Mon­tre­al and Que­bec have to offer, it real­ly is the top choice in Cana­da.”

Mon­tre­al “cul­tur­al­ly stands apart and cre­ates an envi­ron­ment that real­ly allows peo­ple to cre­ate in a unique way,” he added. “There’s a lot of great cre­ative work that’s being done here, not just in games, but in arts as well.”

Que­bec’s video-games indus­try now employs about 13,000 peo­ple, accord­ing to a 2019 report by the mar­ket-research firm Nordic­i­ty. That’s 31 per cent more than in 2017.

The arrival of 2K “con­firms the sta­bil­i­ty and, most of all, the tal­ent char­ac­ter­iz­ing Que­bec’s video-games sec­tor,” Guy LeBlanc, Investisse­ment Québec’s chief exec­u­tive offi­cer, said in a state­ment.

2K is a sub­sidiary of Take-Two Inter­ac­tive Soft­ware Inc., a New York-based enter­tain­ment com­pa­ny whose prod­ucts include the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead series. Take-Two has about 3,400 employ­ees work­ing in game devel­op­ment and post­ed rev­enue of about $2.7 bil­lion in its 2019 fis­cal year.

ftomesco@postmedia.com