A great thing about all the developers, publishers, professionals you meet at the GDC ‘08 is that they are all open and keen to work with studios from across the globe.
The Game Outsourcing Summit advised by Jason Robar of Artisto digital is being held all day long on the 19th as one of the many tracks at the GDC and the opening talks and presentations made it very clear that the word outsourcing was irrelevant and that it was in the very nature of the game development and distribution lifecycle, that IP creators work with several third party service providers that specialise in processes and whether the provider be in the same city, the same country or 3000 miles away it didn’t matter as long as certain imperatives were clearly addressed.
“I really hope this is the last outsourcing summit we have,” began Jason, “traditionally we have been outsourcing work since the 80s so do we mean outsourcing as in offshoring?”
“We have this notion that comapnies in China and India don’t get our culture and sensibilities, but the point is if they keep playing great games and keep working with publishers and developers from here, eventually they will deliver great games. I wouldn’t call it outsourcing business but the services business including middleware, creative, technical, art and other processes. Long live game development 2.0 and outsourcing is dead and it’s just about how we do development with service providers from across the world.”
Elaborating upon Game Development 2.0, Steve Gray of Vykarian shared quite a few interesting insights.
He pointed out that the old school triangle is how to be creative, how to do it cheaper (Cost effective) and how to do it faster. “Now the thing about game development is that it’s an iterative process,” shared Steve, “and the new school is all about being creative, agile, and scalable which eventually confirms to the same objectives of faster and more cost effective, but the approach is more evolved and effective.”
He shared from his experience while working at leading Game Publishers, “I spent five years at one of the world‘s largest game publishers and worked on a very big franchise. We had a large team of around 120-150 people during pre pro and 200 during production, large monolithic teams and it was expensive to have such large teams all the time. It meant a lot of pressure, every week I would get messages from the top that there was a big team to take care of and the development needed to be sped. That kind of thing sort of pushes you into making the game because of the pressure and you may not neccesarily be ready and the game design may not be the best possible.”
Steve shared that as a game developer company one ideally wants to focus on coming up with great game ideas that can be great fun, and that doesn‘t need too many people. “In fact it’s better to have lesser people and do it, so the pressure is less,” shared Steve. He pointed out that the old school model was to staff people in bulk like 50 at one go and then another 50 and keep chugging with the 100+ for all of the game development cycle. But in the new school, the staffing is in stages, synchronised with the development and it helps save close to 30% of the cost and on a US$3 Million game, that’s a lot!
“It even helps build a better game,” he added.
Steve agreed with Jason that outsourcing was not the word, it was in fact about how do groups of companies, each that specialise in certain processes, collaborate together. “So there‘s a core team of around 10-15 in the US and then bring in an agile team thats tech savvy of another 10-15 could be from the US, Korea, China, India and then you pull the trigger and bring in a reasonably managed way, the army of close to 70+ people to build the content, but you get in the army when everything is ready and just needs to be produced.”
“And when you apply the model of staffing in stages and are open to work with International studios the cost reduces further and comes down to half,” he added.
Talking about how technology had made globalisation possible, Steve spoke about his own studio Vykarian and the way it functions. “I as the producer am in San Francisco, the art and technology team is in Shanghai and production team is in Nanjing. We use skype, vpn, all bits of IT to make it happen, and its seamless and as good. If you are willing to invest in IT, in meeting the people you work with and have the people who have the language and communication skills, then nothing is stopping you from globalising your development model, the only thing that would stop you is fear. We want to be able to continue to be able to make good games other than sequels and franchises, we need to find ways of making it cost effective. You will not only save money, but also make a better product,” he stressed.
Continuing on the outsourcing bit, he next focused on the tricky part in this model. According to him, it was not outsourcing itself that was the challenge, but the managing of people that come from different cultures, have different sensibilities and speak different langauges, the challenge was to make them all together and click as an integrated team.
Sharing from his experience, he pointed out that many companies that get into global offshoring, first go and hire literature graduates in Chinese, or Japanese or hire professional business translators. That according to Steve is a mistake, since the games biz has a lot of technical domain knowledge and jargon understanding thats required and normal translators wouldn‘t be able to do it. “The translator simply wouldnt be able to understand the jargon or technical terms and things wouldnt mean the same. There are people with technical backgrounds who make games and speak different languages, go find them. We have a pretty high concentration of games savvy producers who are bilingual,” he stressed very emphatically.
He also pointed out that IT focus was also very important,” Don’t underestimate IT, it does require investment and people who know what they are doing and it’s really really important.”
Concluding his presentation, Steve shared some important Dos for International companies looking to offshore globally.
– When people work with other companies, they meet and hang out with them and make sure they can work together, why wouldn’t you do the same when you send your work 3000 miles away. You need to know the countries you are working in, be part of their local industry landscape.
– Maintain personal relationships with the owners and senior management of your outsource partners
– Integrate your near and far source teams as closely as possible.
– Give clear briefs, teach them the tools, they are part of the project and its really important.