Partner Content, presented by Virtuos
Video game development is a huge undertaking, requiring a broad array of experts with specialized skills. One that requires a huge team and an endlessly complex project roadmap – or working with a co-development studio that offers the expertise required at each stage of the development process. Distributed and external development offers a tremendous amount of flexibility, letting studios scale more quickly and deliver better, more creative games, faster.
In this GamesBeat in Conversation, Tim Fields, COO of Virtuos, spoke with GamesBeat news writer Rachel Kaser about the ways external development is changing the industry for the better.
Virtuos has co-produced some of the biggest games in the world over the past twenty years, such as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Cyberpunk 2077, and more. It’s also helped adapt titles to other platforms, recently bringing NieR:Automata and The Outer Worlds to the Nintendo Switch. They not only specialize in full game development, including brand new games, game remasters, and game remakes, but offer specialized skills like art or character building and a variety of specialized tech solutions. They work out of different studios around the world – artists in Ho Chi Minh City, facial animation experts in Los Angeles, developers in Dublin and so on.
“As games have become more complicated and more expensive, this gives people a way to come to market faster, to not carry as much in fixed costs, and to not have to develop every single type of expertise that’s required to ship a game, which can be really expensive and hard to do,” Fields says. “It’s not outsourcing, which is building a bunch of specifically well-understood known things, and instead is working closely with our clients to make sure we understand their problems, their opportunities, their challenges, and that we can then come with a bespoke solution to make sure that that game gets to market and is a huge hit with players.”
A diverse global team also brings a multifaceted blend of perspective across lived experiences in a variety of cultures, which is critical today – and even required – to reach a growing, and increasingly diverse, gaming audience.
The evolution of the game development ecosystem
When you imagine a game development studio, you might envision a huge room of passionate developers working in the same room, all sleeping under their desks, frantically trying to bring a huge and anticipated title to market. It’s the kind of development story that’s been romanticized over time, but it’s also not sustainable. Today’s games – especially the triple-A titles – are hugely complex, requiring highly skilled developers in various disciplines; in other words, a 300+ strong team in some cases. That’s cost prohibitive for most studios, or even impossible for smaller, indie studios.
“By distributing these types of expertise around the world, you can draw upon the best talent in the world at different types of things,” Fields says. “You can also help adjust price points to make sure that you as a game maker are able to pick and choose where you want to spend your resources.”
The complexity there is coordinating work across time zones, cultures, and studios. That’s where an external development partner comes in, managing the distributed process, while the main studio focuses on its development plan and goals.
Plus, Fields adds, the expertise that it takes to become a grandmaster of some skills is far higher than it used to be, particularly as technology and technology solutions evolve, and consumer quality demands keep growing. The amount of agility and flexibility and the speed with which you need to be able to respond to changing player tastes or changes in platforms or changes in the way communities work is very high. And studios no longer have the luxury of time, as deadlines get tighter.
“An investment in distributed external development can provide you with a ton of flexibility for not just this game, but your next five games at that studio,” he says. “That is the real advantage here. You can see some of the studios around the world that have become great at this, using it to deliver one hit after another for a long period of time.”
Increasing indie developer quality and velocity
The amount of work required to bring any game to market is always so much higher than anybody believes it will be when they’re first dreaming up a game. Distributed development is a way to minimize the amount of crunch and overtime and focus efforts on the things your team is truly great at. For indie studios, it’s a way to bring in the skills that a small team might lack, or need extra backup for, Fields points out.
“Regardless of the size of your team, there is a huge advantage to knowing what you want to be great at and what you want to bring on some other experts to do,” Fields says. “If you’re able to figure out the right places to focus internally, the right types of partners to bring on for external development, then you have a good shot at making something wonderful.”
Distributed game development and the future
There are about 3 billion gamers in the world today. The next 20 years will add another billion gamers, roughly, across platforms and genres, from small indie mobile games to huge triple-A tours de force that take thousands of person-years to create.
“Increasingly, small, focused teams with a clear vision who can take advantage of distributed development in order to bring on the skills they need, the partners they need, when they need them, and then bring their games to market in a timely, affordable fashion, those are the teams that are going to win,” Fields says. “They’re going to win because they’re able to build games that a bunch of players somewhere in the world fall in love with. I genuinely believe that distributed game development is the structure that will allow us to continue to delight those 4 billion gamers in the next 20 years.”