Yep I agree. The other advantage Vancouver always had is that there's a pretty significant amount of residential Downtown and near Downtown, and so Downtown didn't fully empty out as badly as many American cities, and there are a massive amount of workers that can walk and bike to work.
I don't have familiarity with the needs of digital effects workers, but I'm unsure that there were any technical barriers for the games folks. There were games studios that shipped games during WFH with all PCs and dev kits on site due to IP issues. The solution was Parsec, a pretty much magical piece of software that is essentially ultra low latency remote desktop.
I remain shocked that so few companies outside of the games industry use this, and the software seems not well known, but maybe everyone else just ships people laptops.
Close colleagues of mine run a video game development company (I worked for a time in that industry). They were doing contract development for one of the huge publishers and were prohibited from doing WFH. During the pandemic, they toughed it out at the office.
I don't have familiarity with the needs of digital effects workers, but I'm unsure that there were any technical barriers for the games folks. There were games studios that shipped games during WFH with all PCs and dev kits on site due to IP issues. The solution was Parsec, a pretty much magical piece of software that is essentially ultra low latency remote desktop.
https://parsec.app/
I remain shocked that so few companies outside of the games industry use this, and the software seems not well known, but maybe everyone else just ships people laptops.