Almost every significant game studio uses the services of third-party teams in working on AAA titles. This is reported by The Outline, which has studied the gaming outsourcing development market and talked with representatives of several companies.
According to The Outline, external video game development has become a big business in the last decade. The publication cites statistics according to which 86% of gaming companies resorted to outsourcing studios back in 2008.
The role of outsourcing is growing along with the cost of creating high-budget video games, since studios cannot cope with the required volumes on their own.
For example, to work on the Horizon Zero Dawn role-playing action game, Guerrilla Games has contracted 18 outsourcing firms.
One of these companies was Virtuos studio, 65 employees of which for 2 years created the design of creatures and locations for the world of Horizon Zero Dawn.
The staff of third-party development companies can exceed the number of employees of their employers by 2-3 times. For example, the same Guerrilla Games employs 250 people, and the Chinese Virtuos employs a total of 1.3 thousand employees in 8 offices around the world.
In addition to Horizon, Virtuos authors have worked on such titles as Uncharted 4, Forza Motorsport 7 and others.
Also on the topic:
- 39% of Russian-speaking companies pay $10-15 per hour for outsourcing graphicsDeveloper Brothers – A Tale of Two Sons bought outsourcer Forza Horizon 3