You are Véronique Dubé, VP of Innovation at Studio Lumibec, a video-game studio in Montréal. The finance chief wants to take back the studio's protected hours for the next instalment of its big franchise. Before the first planning session at nine, you have to decide which figure you will treat as decisive.
The situation
It is Monday, 11 May 2026. Lumibec, founded in 2008, has 620 people and billed CA$180 million in 2025. About 70% of it, some CA$126 million, came from a single franchise now in its sixth year and falling by about 12% a year. The development budget is fixed at CA$36 million: 85% goes to the franchise and 15% to original concepts. In the same resolution, the board has asked for more new titles in the pipeline and a lower cost base.
The studio delivers through project teams, but craft travels elsewhere: three voluntary groups that cut across projects, a rendering guild of about 70 people, a narrative circle of about 45 and a gameplay-systems community of about 60. Nobody is assigned to them or paid to attend. The studio traces each of its original titles back to an experiment born in one of them, inside the 20% of hours Lumibec holds back from production schedules. That protected time costs about CA$9 million a year of capacity it does not sell, and the draft plan from Gilles Perreault, the CFO, moves it onto the sequel, due in nine months.
Your instruments are few. The index of concepts entering the pipeline, with 100 for a healthy year, still reads 100. Voluntary participation across the three communities is 62%, and attendance at the rendering guild's Thursday sessions is down 40% since the crunch began. Going from an idea to a playable prototype now takes 22 weeks; the studio treats about 14 as healthy and 30 or more as a stall. Eight concepts are in the pipeline and none is greenlit. The two senior people who hold the guild and the gameplay community together have had an offer from a competitor; keeping them would cost about CA$400,000. Finance's model puts the franchise's drop-off about 18 months out. You have no teams reporting to you: in the studio's handbook, your authority over the communities is "an invitation rather than a line".