No of course not, it's a combination of things. If you outsource and are still sitting on a 150 staff team internally you're still burning cash at an insane rate. However, if you don't outsource and be smart about it'll be hard to scale that team back.
thats what I dont get I remember reading about the industry supposibly GROWING in the last year but all I hear is company XYZ layoffs 10k people or whatever. but on the outsourcing note, I agree with you about BAD ASS artists but companies dont necessarly outsource for bad ass artists they do it for cheap labor example in…
The problem is that they are selling the same amount as they did the last generation but they cost 10 times as much to make. See the problem? Outsourcing is not going to cure that. Only the biggest of the big hits can actually make that business work for them. Haze is a perfect example. Free Radical basically had to bet…
I always felt Ensemble was 'a long time coming'. If I'm not mistaken, it was MS's most expensive studio, and they made RTS games. Seemed only natural. EA does this almost every year around this time. Lucas Arts announced they were going to start with external development, i.e. outsourcing. I personally think that…
As long as big games keep selling and they are, studios will try to make big games, win or lose. The problem is one of efficiency. There are already a number of smaller studios out there that have the right idea. Keep a small highly experienced core team and buy the services you need. It just doesn't make sense to keep a…
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/12/19/video.game.sales/index.html The market grew 10% this year. That is pretty massive. These big companies and publishers want to exploit that bigger market. They need people to do that. Obviously then the people they are cutting and the shops they are closing are ones they feel are were not…
Things aren't bad all over in the industry, and things will bounce back in some fashion as they usually do. However, now is a very bad time for getting financing, so the new crop of hopefull start-ups is not going to appear as quickly as it would in a normal business climate. For places like Austin, where a bunch of…
The industry is definitely not collapsing. Just changing, you could say evolving. I'm not sure if the team of 20 outsourcing to 100 ppl in China or elsewhere is a long term evolved strategy either. But for now I think it's something we'll see more. In the short term, if you take out the credit crap this is pretty much par…