Village Gamer

ConceptShare has released its Game Studios, Outsourcing and Creative Review IQ white paper (PDF), presented at the recent 2012 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The white paper documents Creative Review Best Practices observed across multiple game teams that rely on outsourcing for asset production.  The best practices provide game studios a way to measure how effectively they are managing their outsourcing workflow.
“We wrote the white paper after seeing how critical outsourcing was becoming to a game team’s ability to deliver projects on time. In particular we observed that some game teams were achieving significantly higher productivity benefits from outsourcing than their industry peers,” says ConceptShare CEO, Nish Patel.

As shortened time-to-market windows and margin pressures have increased on game teams the game outsourcing industry has stepped up to provide access to on-demand talent and increased production capacity. And that talent is usually available at a lower total cost than hiring full-time staff.

“After observing multiple game teams we saw that most were not realizing the full promise of outsourcing. We were able to track most of the unrealized time and cost savings to how effectively a studio was able to communicate and collaborate with their outsourcing partners, provide clear and actionable feedback on assets, and track feedback through to change requests and approval status.”

Many of the world’s leading game studios have have incorporated ConceptShare into how they share, communicate and collaborate with their outsourcing partners. Through their use of ConceptShare, game teams have been able to achieve higher return on their outsourcing budgets.