The reason why outsourcing studios are in demand is quite banal – it’s a way to save time and/or money. This type of work organization is resorted to in several cases:
When the task is one-time. Taking a person on staff makes no sense because after completing the task, he will have nothing to do. In this case, you can bring in a freelancer, but the search and immersion in the work of a suitable specialist can take a long time, and the studio already has a pool of artists, honed for certain tasks.
Urgent tasks need to be closed. If there’s no time to recruit staff, onboard, and immerse people in their processes of animation outsourcing, a contractor will take on all that work. Part of this point echoes the previous one.
You need to do the work that in-house staffers don’t want to do. More often than not, it concerns tasks of the same type: drawing icons, for example. Of course, you can use administrative resources, but not the fact that it will not affect the quality of the material.
In-house employees have other competencies. If your in-house artists are great at drawing people, that doesn’t mean they’re good at drawing technique, and vice versa.
Outsourcer’s key tasks
The outsourcer takes on the following tasks to complete the order:
- Art Direction. We help the customer get exactly what is required from the artists. This is especially important for developers with little experience.
- Evaluation and selection of artists. After a conversation with a client, an art director can understand what kind of skills artists should have, and how to form a team.
- Communicating with artists in a language they understand.
- Securing the stages of internal acceptance.
Early stages of design development
It’s not worth outsourcing a game design company in the early stages of development when your artists are working on a concept. At this stage, there is constant discussion, and exchange of ideas, and the team should be deeply immersed in the project. Otherwise, the output may not turn out at all what the customer’s representative would like to see. But when you have decided on the style, and you need to draw a lot of routine and monotonous things – thematic locations, skins for holidays, events – outsourcers will come to help, like Chip and Dale.
However, if you do not have a full-time team of artists and you do not want to hire them, you can go to the studio at the beginning of development. In this case, the work with the studio will be denser, and the outsourcer’s staff will have to immerse themselves in your internal processes.
You can also assemble your own team of freelancers if you have your own art director, and he has time to manage a freelance team. But in practice, this work can “eat up” the art director’s entire resources, leaving him with no opportunity to engage in his core business.
Cost of design development for video games
The cost depends on the number of studio hours spent on the rendering of all materials. Sometimes one artist can fail, so we give it to another one. The outsourcer takes these risks. By the way, this is one more important competence of an art director – the ability to evaluate the amount of work before the start of the project.
Intermediate points are written in the timetable, in which the client has to choose one of several variants or confirm that he has chosen the right direction. This helps to avoid rework at later stages and saves time in the long run.
