Opinion: Game studios should massively outsource

Indie teams and large gaming companies need to outsource most of the production. This opinion was reached by former employees of the Bundie company after creating their own studio.

Composer Marty O’Donnell and game designer Jamie Grieseme are former Bungie employees. They have worked on the Halo series, Sucker Punch for PS4, Infamous: Second Son and Destiny. Now the team is preparing to launch the VR game Golem in its own studio Highwire Games.

Based on the experience of launching the company, O’Donnell and Grisem argue: for a small studio, it is necessary to hire multitasking employees. “We need everyone to think in pre-production, production and post-production. We need them to be able to connect to every stage of game development. You can’t just be a concept artist, draw beautiful pictures and that’s it. It’s necessary to combine three, four roles, and that’s cool,” explains O’Donnell.

This applies to those employees who work in the studio full-time, since small teams cannot afford to spend extra money. However, this model is also useful for large studios. According to O’Donnell, game companies will soon work in the same way as film studios.

“I think it will be the same as with the film business, where there are sponsors, a director, a producer and a few other people – screenwriters or something. To finish the pre-production, they hire special people, various experts, and then they reduce the staff again. And then they are already engaged in postproduction. And then they release the film,” says O’Donnell.

This approach will help to avoid firing people after each project. “Layoffs are budgeted from the very beginning. I mean, people get fired before that. how the game comes out. Therefore, studio managers are aware of what will happen, they just don’t tell their employees until the game is out. In my opinion, this means that people are treated as cogs, as some kind of resource, and not as professionals,” Grisem believes.

Source: Develop Online