The aim of our research was to examine how clusters appear and develop in the video game sector. We thus did a comparative study of the video games cluster in Montreal and Los Angeles. This paper shows that concentration of human creativity in arts and in technology is a significant economic localization factor, but cross-fertilization of sectors and public policy also contributes to the understanding of the emergence of clusters in certain urban regions. Thus, political and industrial factors offer an explanation as to why clusters emerge and how they evolve, going beyond the purely geographic or economic factors. In LA as in Montreal, the cross-fertilization with film is important. However, in Montreal, it is the public policy contributing to financing jobs in the Multimedia City and the French language that brought Ubisoft to the city; this contributed to make the city well known in the field, creating a “brand” for the city and thus fuelling the cluster development. 1. Introduction Despite economic globalization, the polarization and concentration of human creativity, innovations, and industrial development in given urban regions persists [1–3]. For the last thirty years, researchers in economic geography have looked at economic and market factors, but more recently, they have analyzed nonmarket factors, from the fields of sociology, public policy, and culture, in order to understand the geography and the variety of clusters in urban regions [4, 5]. In our research, we sought to determine why video games clusters appeared in Montreal and Los Angeles. Two factors dominate in the two zones. In the case of Los Angeles, it is clearly the relation with film and cross-fertilization between the two sectors, while in Montreal, it is the public policy aimed at attracting firms to create the City of Multimedia, as well as cross-fertilization with film. Our paper sheds light on these factors, on the basis of a research conducted in these two main video games clusters in Montreal and Los Angeles. This contributes to the theory in the field, as the specific sources of the clustering process are not often studied in various cities, as it is often taken for granted that firms tend to cluster and agglomerate for economic reasons or location costs (as is the case in the aeronautics sector, e.g.; cf. [6]). We show that other factors (presence of related sectors, cross-fertilization, and public policy) play an important role. After our introduction, Section 2 briefly reviews the relevant literature. The methodology and a synthesis of the results are then presented in
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