I think it's a mix off all of the above. At my company, we outsource to studios in China for the most part. A friend of mine at a AAA studio told me they are outsourcing a majority of their character work to senior level freelance character artists. Point is, instead of using intro level artists to help, a lot of studios…
Jacque brings up a very valid point. Even when we start to discuss how to increase resources for our current game, it's always "we can outsource this stuff."
The Harsh reality of the situation is simple: The Junior Character Artist position has been replaced with Outsourcing. This has created a lions share of problems, (I'm not going to pretend like it's a good thing), but I think I can name like 4 Junior Character Artists that have joined since 2010, and they were UBER gosu to…