BETA | OUTSOURCING
sound guys, and in time the trend will affect coders as well. “But, on the other hand, there are UK studios today who are only in business because they’ve been able to use offshore partners and suppliers,” he says. “That adds up to a lot of jobs saved in UK studios who would otherwise have gone bust. I wouldn’t want to have to estimate whether on balance more jobs have been safeguarded or lost by offshoring.” As mentioned earlier, outsourcing is about finding talent that’s doesn’t need to be trained up, nor kept on a permanent contract; it’s flexible enough to fit in to the flux as projects wind up and new work is sought. David Tolley is offshore manager for Nottingham-based Monumental, which has recently ramped up significantly both at home and abroad, via its own satellite studio in India. “Obviously cost can be a major factor when deciding to outsource, but the fact is that the UK has nowhere near enough skilled artists to fill the roles currently taken by external developers. It can take years to train as a good game artist, so outsourcing is a great way to hire specialist skill fast.” Monumental uses resources in India to supplement its UK operation, rather than replace it. Through doing that, the studio is able to work on more than one massivelymultiplayer online game at a time, when few have the resources to work on even one in the UK. “Without the offshore option I think we’d be seriously understaffed and in future we wouldn’t be able to compete,” he admits. “It’s not a magic solution, but it can certainly reap benefits when planned carefully alongside our UK operations.” There’s also the issue of what to outsource as well – and, given that many aspects of game development need instant feedback and constant iteration, the time difference and distance mean that certain things can’t be efficently managed from abroad. “It’s much easier to assign, track, and give feedback on single game assets as opposed to managing an offshore pipeline where level building and creation are involved,” Tolley continues. “Often this part of development 36 | SEPTEMBER 2009
needs daily interaction with design and production departments as well as managing hundreds of individual assets, which makes it impractical at present. PURE SHORES Of course, it’s important to remember that outsourcing and offshoring aren’t synonymous, even if the former may often imply the latter. In addition to renowned and established outsource services in the UK such as 3D Creation Studio, many smaller developers across the UK act as unsung heroes through contract work, especially those looking to fund their own adventures into new IP. Beriah commonly uses talent from the UK, says Hassall: “In fact, the most common
The UK has nowhere near enough skilled artists to fill all the roles taken by external developers. David Tolley, Monumental country for us to place work into is the UK. If we’re building a full development it will almost always have a ‘western’ component, usually UK based. Not only that, but for specific tasks and sub-projects, a UK team will often be the most effective option.” While Monumental doesn’t use UK outsourcers currently, it has done in the past. “Definite plus points are the communication and locality. It’s easy to hop on a train and be with the studio in a matter of hours to hammer through any issues. Some UK studios only source UK talent – most of whom have a background in the industry so are very capable and understand the process the game-assets will go through. Other studios use the UK as a base and use art teams from other parts of the world so can be cheaper.” Regardless of the benefits, some people worry about developing an increasing reliance on resources from abroad will lead us
to lose out when those emerging markets begin creating global-facing products themselves. “We’re just not training artists here – we’re training them overseas. What will happen when overseas takes their art skills and starts using them to produce their own games?” questions Mulhern. “What happens when they become so focused on their own stuff, or on dealing with domestic clients – because if art’s cheaper over there you can bet that coding will become cheaper too – that they decide they’re no longer interested in doing our dirty work?” Tolley has heard the argument before, and points to the Monumental model as proving that these resources don’t have to be treated with suspicion; they can be brought internally, so any training done benefits the studio both now and in the future. “The ‘us and them’ attitude is a recurring theme in discussions about outsourcing, and it can get a bit tiring. In my opinion we need ‘them’ as much as they need ‘us’. The great part of having an offshore studio is being able to integrate that team into the company as a whole. We’ve had the whole team over to our headquarters in Nottingham and we’re all on the same intranet, reading the same emails, and so on. We’re not ‘teaching the Indians’ – we’re training our staff.” Hassall refutes the argument from its origins: we’re not the ones teaching them. “Can anyone seriously suggest that the MMOs that have emerged in China and Korea, the casual games from the Ukraine and the FPSs from Eastern Europe are all with us only because some superior westerner has condescended to teach Johnny Foreigner how to do it? That’s patronising, and it’s bollocks. There are two billion people in China and India alone, and a lot of them are clever enough to work stuff out for themselves – and they have done already.” At the end of the day, globalisation is with us. That means that a British team or company has bigger markets and more opportunities, but more competitors as well. We’re all happy to embrace the positive side of that. We’ll just have to get used to the negative side, too – because this is a tide that we don’t get to fight against.”