Quebec entertainment company Défi-Évasion is launching MindOpus, a new brand to distribute its online games in English Canada and the United States.

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Défi-Évasion, a company founded by Véronique Girard and Dave Welsh almost eight years ago, has been a real success in Quebec. She specializes in immersive games in which participants must solve puzzles to escape from a room.

With the pandemic, the two entrepreneurs decided to up their game by adding an online puzzle game platform.

“We’ve had and continue to have great success with online gaming in Quebec. So the natural reflex was to go to English Canada and the United States, which are markets very open to this type of game,” explains Mr Welsh.

Ambitious goals

The use of MindOpus has already started while several sales are active, the entrepreneur states.

“We have already sold more than 300 games there. It’s a start, I would say modest, but one that is fully controlled and desired to ensure the machine is running well before the marketing valves are fully opened,” continues Mr Welsh.

But the sales targets for MindOpus are much more ambitious for the next few years, he says.

“Our target for the next three years is to reach 100,000 games sold,” says Mr. Welsh.

The entrepreneur also wants to develop a space with MindOpus where companies could, for example, ask to create a custom game to inform, educate or raise awareness for their customers.

The name of the new brand, MindOpus, has a very symbolic meaning specific to the type of games on offer. It is a contraction between the words “mind” and “octopus” (octopus), “the octopus is one of the most intelligent animals, demonstrating the ability to memorize, learn, orient and adapt to its unusual environment”.