The reason game art outsource is so popular is relatively trivial – it is a way to save time and/or money. This type of video game studio work is resorted to in several cases:
- When the task is a one-time thing. There is no point in employing a person on staff since once the task has been accomplished, he will have nothing to do. In this case, you can bring in a freelancer, but the finding and immersion in the work of a proper specialist can take too long, and the studio already has a pool of artists sharpened for specific tasks.
- Urgent tasks have to be closed. If there’s no time to hire staff, do the onboarding, and immerse people in your processes, a contractor will take care of all that job. Part of this paragraph echoes the previous one.
- You must do the work in-house staffers don’t want to do. Most often, it concerns single-type tasks: drawing icons, for example. Of course, you can use administrative resources, but not the fact that it will not affect product quality.
- In-house staff has other competencies. If your staff artists are great at drawing people, that doesn’t mean they’re good at drawing technique, and vice versa.
There are two main types of clients. The first doesn’t always know what they need (sometimes it’s not even game developers: sometimes marketing companies ask us to develop characters for an advertising campaign). In this case, the company organizes a meeting where the art director, art lead, and project director are present. During the conversation, they decide exactly what the client wants: what style he likes, what existing games he should focus on, and more specific details such as the characters’ proportions and degree of cartoonishness. The result of this conversation is a term of reference that allows them to get the artists involved.
The second type of clients is those who have worked with outsourcers more than once. More often than not, they send us a detailed ToR, which has everything we need to get started.
The cost of the work depends on the number of studio hours spent on rendering all the materials. Sometimes one artist may not be able to cope with the task, and then the company assigns it to another artist. The outsourcer takes on such risks. By the way, this is another essential competence of the art director – the ability to estimate the amount of work before the start of the project.
Intermediate points in the work schedule are immediately specified, where the customer has to choose among several options or confirm that the right direction has been chosen. This helps to avoid rework at later stages and saves time. It’s essential to be in constant communication during a project.
Conclusion
To summarize, the outsourcer takes on the following tasks:
- Art Direction. The company helps customers get exactly what they need from artists. This is especially important for developers with little experience.
- Evaluation and selection of performers. After a conversation with a client, an art director can understand what kind of skills artists should have, and how best to form a team.
- Communicating with artists in a language they understand.
- Ensuring the stages of internal acceptance.
For small studios, working with such companies allows them to do larger-scale projects with limited resources. And for large companies turning to outsourcing studios is an opportunity to get art of required quality on time with minimal time and effort.
