How to establish a game outsourcing studio?
polycounter lvl 11
Hi,
It's been a while since I started working as a fulltime freelancer. I got pretty frequent projects and the payments are also pretty good. I'm wanting to expand my path up as a game outsourcing studio, do you guys have any idea on how to do it or is there any book that I can take as reference? Of course there will be things related to our policy of establishing a company here where I live, but I think I can ask my lawyer about that.
For now the most difficult thing for me is getting projects as a team. Game studios seem to prefer me working as an individual rather than a team, and I'm not sure why is that.
Replies
Business Plan?
And more importantly if you've hadn't already...read the following cover to cover!
Graphic Artists Guild Handbook
Also if you don't mind me asking, where do you live?
i can tell you from my own experience you do not need a business plan, as whatever your business plan will be initially, you made it for the trashbin anyways.
you might need one, say for some initial state funding or whatever. but the reality will just be different than any of your plans. unless you have a partner that backs those plans and helps building this up, which i guess is unlikely unless you know that partner very well.
that being said, i guess it depends on what you want to acomplish. i started with one artist, then more friends joined me over time. now we run an outsource company with 70+ artists working pretty much full time with us. None of this was planned initially, the core idea was, not working alone and working with friends on cool shit. what you will need is quality and consistency, everything else will likely (just based on my own personal experience) fall into place. being well connected or "known" in the industry will certainly help a ton.
tbh my experience is quite the different one by now, clients do want teams and companies rather than individual freelancers. it's usually just less hassle for them to talk to one person vs handling a bunch of "strangers" remotely. i guess it comes down to the size of the clients really, a small company will want to work with individuals as they are probably cheaper. a big company would rather offset certain amounts of works, which an individual will never be able to handle. But of course there are also very good very specialized individual freelancers that make a shit ton of money, more than we as a studio would get paid.
take all this with a grain of salt, we didnt have a masterplan, a lot of things just fell into the right places over the years.
Business Plan?
Likewise based off of personal experience but none games industry, the venture I was involved with geared more toward tech peripheral support startup, during the early 2000s.
yeah i see, then you certainly need more of it ecause you have dependencies the normal freelance artist just doesnt have. i mean all they need is a computer and blender to get working nowadays.
Thank you guys for all your comments. For sure they did help a ton!
@Neox yeah it's not until you mentioned it that I realized, I was more focus on startup studios, which fit perfectly as you said. They preferred individuals, with cheaper price and probably didn't need a lot of work that needed to be done. This is probably the reason why they seemed to be not too interested when I presented myself as a team. I guess I will just have to be more professional and improve our skills even more if I want to attract bigger studios then. Do you mind sharing how did you get your connection at the first place? Like did you have to build websites or go to industrial seminars, etc.?
@sacboi I did read that book a couple of years ago, but as I see, the book is more focus on individuals, which I'm doing pretty well so far, rather than teams. I'm living in Vietnam at the moment.
pretty much all my networking was just using forums, like this one here. I hate giving talks, i feel like i have nothing to tell people. i am usually hiding behind a screen and do some art stuff. my website hasnt been updated in 10 years, i also dont have a personal portfolio since then. everything i did went into the company. which now after 10 years will get a website soon :)
but its a totally different market nowadays. forums are sorta dead, social media is very forgettable by definition, i wouldnt know where to start today to be honest. but my guess would be, consistency and quality and surviving long enough until stuff is rolling.
@Neox Thank you for your sharing! Appreciate that!