Outsource game art is one of the important parts of game development. The heyday of outsourcing has come at a time of growing insecurity in the video game industry, as software sales have declined year over year since peaking in 2008. A poll of game developers that year found that 86% of game studios used outsourcing for at the very least one aspect of development. And in 2012, Square Enix also admitted that both Tomb Raider and Hitman: Absolution, even with more than three million units shipped worldwide, weren’t meeting the firm’s sales expectations, resulting in the resignation of its president, Yoichi Wada, and other major layoffs.
What outsourcing is used for
Companies that outsource, such as iLogos, are quite helpful. The co-founder of Bungie has explained the concept of outsourcing as such: the main gameplay design and execution is maintained inside the studio itself, while the re-priority work with a lower priority is done elsewhere by a contractor. Seropyan believes that the main benefit of outsourcing is not necessarily to save money but to use the company’s resources most efficiently.
In addition, by using outside engineering, client art directors can worry less about frustrated or depressed artists and developers because they don’t like the current draft. And that means internal teams are able to work more efficiently and effectively because they have the opportunity to focus on more important and interesting tasks while the more down-to-earth repetitive or labor-intensive tasks are handled on the side.
Minimum wage demands and the current job market can make it difficult to find experienced developers who are willing to work within a budget. The same project can take weeks or months internally to hire and train the right people and explain what they are supposed to do. Every company has limited Resources, and every employee has limited time and energy.
Some developers would be willing to outsource every part of game development. 3D or 2D assets, music, programming, and even scripting. On the other hand, an unsourced developer often specializes in one piece: just programming, for example, or writing music.
What is the outsourcing studio iLogos?
iLogos Game Studios is an international computer game development and game technology solutions company.Â
Among the games created at iLogos are Shadow Fight and Shadow Fight 2, the arcade game Vector, and the city builder Megapolis. Participated in the creation of more than 400 games.
The company was founded in 2006 in Lugansk, and later opened offices in Kharkiv, Kryvyi Rih, Dnipro, Lviv, Mykolaiv, and German Hamburg. The Odessa branch opened in 2015.
iLogos outsources game development for Electronic Arts, Wargaming.net, Disney, Nekki, Social Quantum, and others. According to the company, iLogos has implemented more than 400 game projects, including Megapolis, Vector, Farmers’ Territory, World of Tanks: Reporting, Puzzle Wars and others.
In 2012 Alexander Goldybin became a co-founder, CEO, and director of iLogos Europe (later Co-Founder and Chairman of iLogos).
In 2014, with the beginning of the ATO, the management offered to move the employees to other offices of the company. The development office was moved to Kyiv, the headquarters is located in Hamburg.
So almost all of the major AAA-format studios outsource to some degree, but it is impossible to find out exactly who is behind a particular asset or even something big like entire open-world regions.
But no matter how customers feel about the labor of outsourcers, the amount of work on the side in video game development will only increase. Games are expanding, becoming more detailed and voluminous. So outsourcing, having come once in the industry, became an integral part of a large industry, and this craft will only continue to evolve, with outsourcer studios coming to the developers’ aid, even if the players will never know about their work.