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Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) Sales Deck (20-slide PowerPoint presentation). This document includes a set of slides on Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), often called BPO or just Outsourcing. BPO is typically the primary revenue stream for full service consulting firms (e.g. Accenture, Deloitte, IBM). These slides were originally developed to be included in sales decks [read more]
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The Witcher 3 offers a revealing case study. CD Projekt Red’s internal team focused on core gameplay systems, narrative content, and establishing the visual benchmark for the game’s art style. Then they brought in external studios to multiply their output. Two thousand trees for Velen’s forests? Outsource it. Variations of peasant clothing across different regions? Send the specifications to a partner studio. Complex water effects for Skellige’s coastlines? That goes external too.
The Polish studio coordinated with multiple outsourcing partners across Europe and Asia, each handling different aspects of the game’s massive asset library. Some focused purely on environmental art: rocks, vegetation, architectural elements. Others specialized in character models or animation work. Maintaining quality consistency while dramatically scaling up production was crucial.
Ubisoft turned this into an industrial process. For Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, they orchestrated a global production network. Internal teams in Montreal, Quebec, and other locations set creative direction and built core systems. External partners handled huge volumes of asset creation. When you’re building a game that spans two countries with historically accurate architecture, thousands of props, and countless character variations, you can’t do it all in-house without extending development by years.
A game art studio like Kevuru Games fits into this ecosystem by specializing in high-quality 3D models, textures, and visual effects that match AAA standards. They’ve worked on projects where consistency with the client’s art style is non-negotiable, requiring detailed style guides, regular check-ins, and iterative feedback loops. Work gets integrated into a larger production machine rather than simply handed off.
The process follows a clear pattern. The lead studio creates comprehensive art bibles: detailed documents that specify everything from color palettes to polygon budgets. They’ll often create “golden masters,” reference assets that show exactly what quality bar external teams need to hit. Then work gets divided up based on specialization and capacity.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Warzone provide another interesting example. Infinity Ward and Raven Software maintain tight control over gameplay feel and core content, but the sheer volume of maps, weapon variants, operator skins, and seasonal content requires external support. Studios specializing in hard-surface modeling might focus on weapons and vehicles. Others handle environment art for multiplayer maps. Some focus purely on optimization, ensuring assets run smoothly across different platforms.
The communication infrastructure is elaborate. Most major productions use centralized asset management systems where external teams upload work directly into the main project pipeline. Lead artists review submissions, provide feedback, and request revisions. Assets, critiques, and iterations flow constantly. When it works well, it’s invisible. When it doesn’t, you get visual inconsistencies that players notice immediately.
The process might sound chaotic, but it’s meticulously structured. Each asset passes through layers of approval (from lead artists to technical directors) before being integrated into the live build. This discipline is what keeps hundreds of contributors aligned under a single artistic vision.
Companies like Keywords Studios, Virtuos, and Sperasoft have built entire business models around this need. They maintain large teams of specialized artists who can scale up or down based on project needs. When a major publisher needs fifty environment artists for six months to finish a game before launch, these studios can provide them. When that project wraps, those artists move to the next game.
This flexibility is invaluable for AAA development, where production needs spike dramatically in the final year before release. Internal studios can’t just hire a hundred artists for a year then let them go. External partners solve this problem while bringing genuine expertise. Many of these outsourcing game development studios have artists who’ve worked on dozens of AAA titles, building up institutional knowledge about what works across different engines and genres.
Rockstar’s approach with Red Dead Redemption 2 illustrates the scale. The game’s world is stuffed with thousands of small details: proper saddles on horses, period-accurate weapons, the way light filters through different types of foliage. Much of this detail work went to external teams who could focus on specific categories while Rockstar’s internal staff worked on signature content and core systems. When you need five hundred variations of rocks that look naturally weathered, you outsource to a team that can dedicate weeks to just rocks.
AAA outsourcing isn’t about cutting corners — it’s about optimizing resources. Most established outsourcing studios serving AAA clients charge professional rates. Labor costs vary globally, but that’s not where the main advantage lies. The real savings come from flexibility and efficiency.
Maintaining a permanent staff of three hundred artists is expensive and risky. If a project gets delayed or canceled, that’s a huge financial burden. If the next project needs different specializations, you might have the wrong team composition. External partners let studios scale teams precisely to project needs, bringing in specialists for specific phases without long-term commitments.
Efficiency matters too. A studio that creates nothing but vegetation assets for games gets really good at creating vegetation assets. They’ve optimized their pipeline, they know the common pitfalls, and they can work faster than a generalist team learning as they go. Specialization breeds efficiency, and in an industry where production costs regularly exceed a hundred million dollars, that efficiency translates directly to staying on schedule and on budget.
The next generation of blockbuster games won’t just rely on outsourcing — they’ll be built on it.
The line between “in-house” and “external” is fading fast. Today’s outsourcing partners are no longer silent executors; they’re creative collaborators shaping the worlds we explore.
As production pipelines grow more sophisticated, external teams are taking ownership of full game sections, performance optimization, even art direction support. The result isn’t fragmentation — it’s harmony. Dozens of studios working as one, bound by shared vision and precision.
So the next time you lose yourself in a vast digital world — watching light bounce off a rain-soaked street or noticing the weathered stitching on a sword hilt, remember: that realism isn’t an accident. It’s the outcome of a global symphony of artists, coders, and dreamers, each adding their brushstroke to the illusion.
And that, more than anything, is how modern game outsourcing brings worlds to life.
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