When it comes time to staff a project, how cost effective is it to outsource vs hire a new team member? How is that decision made?asked by [TAC] BuzZz Killer

For the record, I really like this question because this is a debate in the industry as well.

Yeah. For me, a lot of times is just comes down to: How much time do you have for the project? How much money do you have for the project? When does the project need to be out? Those will obviously guide the quality of the project. But once you understand at least one of those three - or as many of those three as you can - it helps you make a better decision., right, so you take into consideration hiring people locally versus hiring people regionally or nationally. You look at - for a lot of things in pre-production it's a big ramp up, you're building a lot at the beginning but you're not necessarily at the end, so it does make sense to staff up but it does it make sense to staff up for permanent staff, forever? Not necessarily. So, I think the idea is to try to get as many people in the game industry jobs and to keep us all employed and to have a great time making great games. But the realities do come down to: How do we make this for the best price possible but hit that quality bar we really want?

Yeah, and I do think outsourcing gets kind of a bad rap in our industry because it's like: "They took our jobs!" or "It means lower quality". And actually there are a lot of super talented people out there that do outsourcing work and so it doesn't necessarily mean lower quality. The taking of the jobs thing is the other one that I wanted to address too which is: If you have a guy like Chris Smith. Chris Smith, Lead Vehicle Artist, makes some beautiful ships, made a lot of the beautiful ships that we have in the game - to ask him to make 34 variations of boxes, barrels, and potted plants is... you know, maybe he'd dig it... I don't know, I'm not going to speak for Chris, but it would be a misuse of his talent. Right, because you can't get anybody to make one of the ships that he makes but you can get a lot of different people that can make those potted plants or those boxes.

And for me, giving somebody with more of a junior... or just getting into the industry, the opportunity to work in a game - that's perfect for them.

Exactly.

It gives them a sense of: How does it plug into the game? How does it fit in the master system?

What's the pipeline... yeah.

Yeah. Right out of school or just looking for a job or somebody between some work... absolutely. Trying to balance giving as many jobs as we can but also the realistic goals of the project without getting this ballooned... anything, budget or schedule, right? It's a balance.

Right. That's another thing that a lot of studios struggle with, I mean in this industry for longest time it was just feast or famine, right? So you ramp up, up, up, up, up... and then you finally have enough team to ship the product... and then a quarter to everybody gets laid off because you can't sustain that. And then there was a popular idea: "Oh, we'll have two teams simultaneously at a studio so that when one project is in pre-production the other project is in full blown production and we've rolled most of team 2 on to team 1 and then once team 1 ships then everybody will roll over to team 2 and we'll do pre-production on team 1. And that one actually worked for quite awhile and that has gone better, I think, but one of the things that outsourcing allows us to do - and this has been really important to Chris - is that you want everybody that you hire to know that you've made a commitment to them. The company has made a commitment to them to take care of them, to nurture them, to grow them in their professional career and in exchange we get this beautiful art, we get beautiful code, whatever it is that that transaction is. And you want to be able to have people have security and trust and faith in the job and outsourcing is a tool you can use to scale without risking not being able to make good on that contract.

Yeah, I think to talk to outsourcing for a second longer: When we say outsourcing we don't just mean taking jobs away from people locally or whatever word you want to use because I think that it gets negatively branded. The outsourcers we use - some are local. They're just called outsourcers because they're not in-house.

Yeah. Guys like ?Ether?.

You got it. There's full teams out there that work with multiple studios - they hire on artists and programmers or whatever it is and then they work with companies like us to build their games and it's actually a very large industry. A lot of people are getting jobs because of that outsourcing opportunity.

That's the other thing to point out is that their entire business model is predicated on... they make a social contract with their guy that may be a freelancer otherwise which is really feast or famine and unstable and he gets a regular full-time job and they're going out and they're hunting for work basically... getting 20 projects at once and that's how they maintain their company's stability. It's an interesting ecosystem. You know, I never realized how much of a business/production nerd I was until I started getting these kinds of questions that get me super excited.

That's what we get excited about. To kind of go back to your original question, we look at all of those factors and then whatever makes sense for the project at the time. Because no project is the same, even when you're making... I'll throw out Madden 25... there may be some kind of formula but it's still a new project, new tech, new artists, new players on the field. There's still new stuff to it, so it all depends on the project.

That's gotta be horrible. They've gotta remake those jerseys every time.

Every time... new pipeline, yeah. Horrible... or you know... fun if you love jerseys.

Yeah. I just like to think that somewhere out there is a guy who did nothing but make hubcaps for GTA.

[laughs] Sure did. And he loves it. Full time job is making real hubcaps, part time job is virtual ones.

And on the weekends... he installs hubcaps on his car. [laughs]

Love it.