It’s safe to say that the gaming industry is one of the largest industries in the world, and it’s just expanding. Co-development is emerging as a popular strategy for achieving this expansion.
Players have high hopes for a rewarding experience in light of the industry’s expansion. These requirements are only increasing as the gaming industry expands and more and more massive studios create epic games that can last for dozens or even hundreds of hours. If not big games, then at least games that are well-made, interesting, and difficult in some way.
What is Co-Development?
As the name implies, “co-development” involves teamwork between the game’s main development studio and a number of outside studios. These businesses are capable of handling any scale of development. Co-development, in contrast to outsourcing, which consists of handing off the entire project to an outside company, is a collaborative effort. It results from several different studios working together to create a great whole. Companies have developed several games in tandem, including Magic Media, Pingle Studio, and Ringtail.
How Can Co-Development Help Games Out?
Companies of all sizes can benefit from collaboration; sometimes, it’s larger corporations looking to grow an existing initiative, and other times its startups with great ideas but not the resources to bring them to fruition. Suppose a studio is the sole owner of the IP at hand.
In that case, they may not want to subcontract a portion of the work but rather remain intimately involved in the project daily and hire another co-development studio to integrate with their existing workforce seamlessly. It’s like obtaining an entire team or only the members you need right away. A co-development studio is helpful if the scope of a project grows beyond initial estimates or if more time or workers are needed to complete the task than initially anticipated.
What Advantage Do You Have When Co-development Is in Place?
Co-development benefits because these organizations have seasoned professionals to handle every facet of making a video game.
We are familiar with the different difficulties that can arise during project construction. They can find answers to potential issues if they work with experts. Co-development also enables publishers to use the expertise that may be lacking inside.
1. Save more on your games
When working on a project with a co-developer, you can cut costs by paying for the time and effort required by the hired team. This is helpful because it eliminates the need to budget for regular wages, benefits, vacation time, training, or extra taxes. You won’t have to worry about providing the necessary software and gear because the outsourced staff will use their own. The cost of software licenses alone might run each artist between $5,000 and USD 10,000. Companies like Styngr support game funding for games, artists, and Metaverse experiences.
2. You will save lots of time
Some might worry that the project will become more difficult to manage and produce fewer results if it is outsourced to a game studio. But the truth is that you’ll be able to free up more time that you may put to better use elsewhere in the business. You may spend that spare time growing your company, boosting output and earnings.
3. Quality of service will be better
According to XDS’s analysis of industry trends for 2021, prospective clients should prioritize service quality when selecting an outsourcing studio. Since co-development studios typically have in-house specialists for every facet of game creation, you can rest assured that you’ll receive the best results.
4. Professional tools are more efficient
It is crucial to stay up with the constant improvements inside games to remain competitive. To achieve this goal, you must utilize the industry’s most recent software and hardware. Of course, this has the potential to result in enormous expenditures, but working with game studios grants you entry to the industry’s top game production tools, which can significantly improve your games.
Service providers and developers/publishers now prefer using open-source game engines like Unity and Unreal to facilitate external development, as opposed to proprietary ones. Outsourced companies are more likely to use Unity games, especially indie games, while large AAA studios prefer Unreal. This isn’t a hard and fast rule. Instead, it is a personal taste.
5. More innovation and creativity
The best ideas come from collaboration amongst teams, so be sure to hire a complete one so that you can pool resources and skills to develop sturdy alliances and exciting games. When faced with the need for originality and ingenuity, a whole team is always the best option.
We’re pleased to supply the expertise and manpower you need to design, develop, and ship your video game without exhausting your in-house team’s resources.
6. Project completion is faster
The work quality and capacity of the team are crucial, but so is the total size of the group. Fifteen employees will undoubtedly finish the job in half the time it would take two. By bringing in a large number of experts, we were able to do the job in record time and beat the deadline by a wide margin.
7. Better ideas and scope of the project
Creating a game in-house has many advantages, but it may also stifle creativity. No matter how diligently you plan and how well you organize, it is challenging to perform these tasks without going overboard. This advantage of co-development is easy to miss if one does not have a long-term viewpoint. If you want to create a genuinely exceptional game, though, you’ll need the input of a large group of experts.
Conclusion
To wrap up, Co-development in games can be a very effective strategy for creating AAA games. Because of the overflowing ideas and creative standpoint, everyone can share their general vision for the project co-development and save companies time, money, and manpower. Working on big projects will always be a hard thing to do.
Still, with Co-development, the entire company’s progress will go along smoothly compared to working on the project without any support from a different group. Having a hand to help in projects, whether big or small, will always be a great idea.