Things to Watch Out for When Choosing Game Art Outsourcing

Dec 23, 2020

The internet is full of articles on the benefits of outsourcing. In most cases, they are all the same in different wording. This means saving money and time, access to new technologies and new markets, and the ability to concentrate on more important ideological tasks. Game art outsourcing risks are a much less covered topic. It is considered that if the advantages have already outweighed, then it makes no sense to discuss possible problems.

It’s actually not that simple. While there are real benefits to outsourcing certain tasks, consideration of the downsides is absolutely essential to avoid serious problems. Which will then be much more difficult to decide than to prevent. Therefore, we are here to analyze video game art outsourcing risks and methods of their neutralization.

Be Careful, Low Quality is Detected

Anyone can face this problem. And the more terrible is the fact that in the modern digital world, it can be quite simple to hide bad expertise. Particular attention should be paid to the recently emerged outsourcing companies actively offering their services in a suspiciously wide range of areas. Most likely they do not have the specified expertise at all. And it’s scary to imagine what they will be able to do if they receive an order for a service for which they do not have specialists.

The difference in the level of your in-house workers and the external team can be too huge for the effectiveness of the collaboration. It is possible that the latter cannot provide you with the result of the quality you need, and this will be revealed only when the process of collaboration has already been launched. As a result, instead of saving time and money, you waste this time and money and find yourself forced to look for a new contractor.

How to protect yourself from such a risk of game art outsourcing?

The main recommendation is a thorough preliminary analysis of the profile of the company that you liked. Studying the portfolio, the composition of the team for each direction, business profiles on various resources and showcase on art sites is already a good help for the first conclusions.

The next thing you can clarify is the transparency of work processes at each stage from concept to implementation. Ideally, an outsourcing company will be able to tell you about all the details of cooperation after the first preliminary assessment of your project. If it finds it difficult to say something specific, then most likely it does not have enough experience yet, and it makes sense to pay attention to someone else.

Negligence in Concept and Deadlines

Adherents of in-house employees who are in the office and will not disappear during the working day often scold remote workers for their potential unreliability and lack of organization. Indeed, there can be certain nuances when working with an external team.

The first is a free interpretation of the task. This is especially true if you gave the team some freedom of imagination and did not explain in too much detail what you wanted to see as a result. The second is an irresponsible attitude towards deadlines. Since the team is at a distance, you cannot influence them in any way except by an angry message or call.

How to avoid such problems? Art outsource requires a consistent and thorough approach. Thus, your terms of reference should be spelled out in as much detail as possible. Provide your contractor with detailed information about the essence of the project. State its genre focus, plot, features, and more. This will reduce the likelihood of misinterpretation of the assignment.

When it comes to deadlines, there is no way to check this in advance. But there is a way out: this is the signing of an agreement, which will provide for certain fines for failure to meet deadlines. This is true for companies that have recently entered the market. Often, when working with experienced professional teams, this is unnecessary: you can take the company’s word for it. It cares most about its reputation and will do its best to ensure you have a positive collaboration experience.

A contract can also be a good defensive way to protect sensitive data. Since you will be forced to give the contractor a lot of the concept date about your project, you face the danger of disclosure. When drawing up a contract, be sure to take into account the legal peculiarities of the country with which you cooperate. A properly drafted non-disclosure agreement makes your collaboration with any 3D animation studio much safer.

Final Words

Any collaboration with a third party has risks. But since access to information is now almost unlimited, any possible problem can be neutralized at the very beginning, not allowing it to affect the result of your cooperation with an outsourcing partner. Follow our recommendations and you will not face the above problems. Outsourcing is a really effective and useful option that can optimize your work processes.