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With all the attention paid to flashy previews at gaming conferences, Canada’s game development industry is actually fueled by a quiet, deliberate strategy. At the center of this national effort is Jason Lepine, the founder and CEO of XP Gaming Inc. Putting aside corporate fanfare, Lepine is dedicated to creating an interlocking network of business-to-business conferences aimed at bridging the regional divides within the country’s developer landscape.
During the 2026 XP Game Summit in Toronto, I caught up with Lepine to trace his unique path from an industry outsider to a foundational architect of Canada’s professional gaming hubs. Our discussion spanned the summit’s challenging early days, the careful balance needed to coordinate major events in both Ontario and Quebec, and his roadmap for the future.
From Telecom to Gaming B2B Networking: The Origins of XP Gaming
Long before he was coordinating calendars for thousands of creators and publishers nationwide, Jason’s professional trajectory was rooted in an entirely separate field. Armed with an engineering background, he initially built his career in telecommunications. Deep down, his ultimate goal was to anchor his professional life to his personal love for video games. But making that leap proved difficult; despite sending his resume out for various game engineering roles, he was repeatedly locked out simply because his history didn’t map cleanly to the traditional programming tracks studios expected.
Refusing to let a lack of traditional entry points stall his ambitions, he embedded himself in local gaming meetups. Eventually he partnered with local creators to organize community-focused showcases. By 2016, he officially walked away from his telecommunications career to focus entirely on media and event-planning for the gaming world.
Lepine soon observed an unaddressed gap in the market: While people loved attending consumer-focused shows, industry professionals were showing up hungry for an environment optimized for high-level business development and networking. Recognizing this unmet need, he began laying the groundwork for a dedicated business conference. Despite a baptism by fire during the pandemic years, the XP Game Summit made its official live debut in Toronto in 2022. Since then the annual summit has matured from an ambitious startup concept into a distinct, permanent pillar of the Canadian gaming ecosystem.
Listening to the Market over Forcing Ideology
One of the most fascinating segments of our conversation revolved around the expansion of XP Gaming’s footprint across Canada, including smaller one-day events on the East and West coasts. Asked if his ultimate goal was to grow these regional events into massive, sprawling conventions to rival the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, Lepine offered a refreshing, humble take on event scaling.
“I can politely say no. I don’t think the industry needs another GDC. I think people love interacting in a more intimate setting… It’s ultimately the market that teaches us what people want. And so I’ve learned to be very attentive and not force my own ideology.”
Rather than focusing on bloated attendee counts, Jason prioritizes creating small, hyper-focused environments where developers can actually secure meaningful business partnerships and grow their companies.
Balancing the Titans: Toronto vs. Montreal (MIGS)
In 2023, the license owners of the historic Montreal International Game Summit (MIGS) approached XP Gaming, looking for a new producer to revitalize their show and redirect it toward a more structured, business-first hybrid model. Having managed both iconic Canadian shows for years now, Jason has carefully cultivated completely separate identities for each so they complement, rather than compete with, one another.
“[We look at] MIGS as our International Hub to Canada for games… it has the international destination of developers, and there’s no way Toronto can replace that.
“Whereas in Toronto… We are still the smaller event, you cater to the Ontario ecosystem and capitalize on the spring energy while MIGS is a winter event…Toronto is more indie-focused with a little bit of AAA, whereas [at] MIGS they’re going to expect a more international model and a larger focus on AAA relationships.”
By targeting different timelines and developer tiers, with Montreal serving as a beacon for European traffic and Toronto operating under the tagline “Canada Connected,” XP Gaming has created a brilliant multi-province synergy.
Navigating the Early “Virtual” Pandemic Hurdles
Keeping an event ecosystem alive when the world shuttered in 2020 was no small feat. Jason pulled back the curtain on how he kept the dream of XP Gaming alive during the height of the pandemic by switching entirely to free, virtual broadcasts.
“We had our first show planned for April 2020 with speakers lined up. When the world shut down I thought, ‘What if you guys want to do this virtually?’ It’ll be a free show… We did it again in 2021, albeit a little more rushed. Once we were able to host a live event again in 2022 we went ahead with all the plans and visions we had before and leveraged what we had learned from our online shows.”
This financial and operational resilience ensured that when the world finally opened back up for in-person gatherings in 2022, XP Gaming hit the ground running with an established, deeply loyal digital audience ready to transition to the show floor.
The Triumphant Return of the Canadian Game Awards
A massive talking point for this year’s summit was the fortuitous pairing with the Canadian Game Awards. After a turbulent period of shifting schedules and a brief hiatus, XP Gaming worked closely with the awards’ original founder, Carl-Edwin Michel, to integrate the gala directly into the summit’s May timeline. Jason admitted there was initial industry anxiety about moving an awards ceremony celebrating the previous calendar year to a spring date.
“You’re so concerned that it would be stigma celebrating the industry in the spring… and I told Carl the founder, ‘Because I think people will always take an excuse to celebrate our industry. No matter what it is.’ … The energy once we announced the collaboration was insane.”
The gamble clearly paid off. Moving the awards away from winter eliminated the threat of classic Canadian snowstorms that plagued previous iterations, replacing it with beautiful spring weather and an electric, collaborative atmosphere.
The Future: Taking Canada to the Global Stage
As our chat wound down, Lepine looked ahead to where he wants to steer the XP Gaming banner over the next five to 10 years. With existing partnerships blooming across Europe and a rapidly rising international reputation, he doesn’t just want to run local shows—he wants to build a global gateway.
“I think our show can play a part in better connecting people… If I have it my way, in the next five to 10 years I see XP as a portal connection throughout the world where people see it as a means to further their goals, whether it’s to grow their company or their games.”
Sitting down with Jason Lepine, it’s abundantly clear why XP Gaming has succeeded where so many other post-pandemic conventions have faltered. It comes down to a leadership style that rejects corporate ego, embraces small-scale, high-value intimacy, and fundamentally believes that the Canadian gaming industry deserves to be connected from coast to coast and recognized Internationally.
