![]() Because if games don’t have companion apps, if they don’t have websites - we have 450 different social media websites supporting all of our franchises, so we have requirements for integrated development that not only keeps the core game alive but keeps the ecosystem around that game humming, because if you’re not delivering content each and every day then the engagement drops.” “It takes a village now, to build these games,” Peter Moore, then COO of EA, said in 2015 at the External Development Summit, “and I’m not just talking about the game itself. But it’s also been creative, reshaping what form publishers think games should take, pushing them to focus on fewer titles that occupy more of their players lives. The change has been partly technological, driven by the escalating complications of new consoles. Outsourcing coordinators are used by Bethesda, which makes Fallout 4 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and PopCap Games, which makes mobile games like Plants vs. Today, the practice is so common that many game studios created full-time coordinator positions to manage outsourcing (in the credits for Horizon, Head of Outsourcing Anton Wiegert appears in the first three minutes of the 34-minute sequence). In 2008, an anonymous poll of 200 major video game studios found that 86 percent relied on outsourcing for some aspect of development. A 2001 study found outsourcing contracts were too small and haphazard to measure, but by 2006, 40 percent of game studios were using outsourcers for background or environmental art. By comparison, Virtuos has 1,300 employees spread across 11 offices in eight countries. Horizon’s developer Guerrilla Games has around 270 employees in its Amsterdam offices. In many cases, outsourcing companies have grown even bigger than the clients who hire them. Among the others: 3Lateral Studio in Novi Sad, Serbia, which helped character modeling and facial animation for human characters Territory Studios, a graphic design company in New York that specializes in interface design Audiomotion in London, which helped with motion capture Kokku in Recife, Brazil helped build models for some of the robotic animals and XPEC Art Center in Taipei, which helped build environmental assets to fill the game’s world. Virtuos was only one of 18 different outsourcing companies that worked on the game. Sixty-five of Virtuos’s employees spent over two years building 11 of Horizon’s 32 enemy robot types modeling many of the bandit settlements spread across the game world. Instead it’s about managing a global network of labor that builds, programs, animates, and designs. Thanks to outsourcing companies like Virtuos, making games today is less about building levels or creating characters. During the same period, she’s watched from the frontlines as outsourced labor became the backbone of game development. In her 12 years with Virtuos, Jie has gone from entry-level QA tester to her current position as a project management officer, helping oversee the company’s project management structure on all of its different games. It’s even better with well-reviewed games like Horizon, which makes her think, “‘Hey my name is in the credits, this is my game!’” she told me in November, when I visited the company headquarters in Shanghai. The incomprehensible thicket of names, thousands of them, goes on for more than 34 minutes.īut for Zhu Jie, a 33-year-old with wireframe glasses and bright pink hair, credits are often the best part of a game, a rare moment of recognition for her and her colleagues at Virtuos Ltd, a company in China that builds 3D art and levels for the biggest game companies in the world: Sony, Microsoft, and Electronic Arts, among others. I checked my phone, went to the bathroom, did the dishes, and refilled my water glass, before returning to the sofa to find the credits still going. When I finished Horizon: Zero Dawn last year, I began creating excuses to get away from the screen as soon as the first unfamiliar name hit the screen. Now, the credits for most major video games are interminable. ![]() The closing credits of Super Mario 64, released in 1996, took about three minutes to list 32 people. End credits for video games used to be simple affairs.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |