Game studios are among the more under-claimed sectors for SR&ED, largely because so much of the work is described internally as “creative” or “content” rather than technical — even when engine, physics, and rendering teams are solving problems with no established solution.
Where Eligibility Commonly Shows Up
● Developing custom rendering, physics, or simulation systems where existing engine features can’t achieve the required performance or fidelity
● Solving networking and synchronization problems for real-time multiplayer at scale under unpredictable latency conditions
● Building procedural generation systems where the output quality or performance isn’t achievable with documented techniques
● Optimizing performance across a wide range of target hardware where standard profiling and tuning don’t resolve the bottleneck
Where It Usually Doesn’t Apply
● Level design, narrative writing, and art asset creation
● Standard use of an off-the-shelf engine’s documented features and tools
● UI/UX implementation and menu system development
● Routine bug fixing within an established, working codebase
The Documentation Gap in Studio Culture
Game development teams typically track work through sprint boards and playtesting notes rather than formal engineering documentation. That’s usually enough — the gap is in recognizing which sprint tickets and postmortems describe genuine technical uncertainty (an engine limitation nobody had solved) versus routine feature implementation.
