CGDC: Achieving Success through Outsourcing

BEIJING, Aug. 27 /PRNewswire-Asia/ -- As the game industry expands and advances, development outsourcing has become a common way of partnership -- a great many orders have been placed in China by companies overseas and there has also been a growing demand for the Chinese game makers to outsource to some of their domestic or foreign counterparts. At the Second China Game Developers Conference, industry experts coming from all around the world discussed how companies could achieve success through outsourcing, with speeches from Mark Van Ryswyk, Senior Director Worldwide Outsourcing at EA, Robert Vernick, COO of EA Shanghai Studio, Tommy Xia, Senior Director of Project Management Department of Winking, and Ed Trillo, Outsourcing Director of Foundation 9 summarized as below:

Mark Van Ryswyk -- Distributed Development: Insights and Opportunities

"EA has dozens of outsourcing partners across the world and is still looking for more. However, most of it is concentrated in the area of art design. In fact, 40% of the company’s art design is done here in China. EA has accumulated a lot of experience in this and think transparency is very important: sometimes partnerships don’t work because the two sides are being suspicious and cautious of each other, looking at the other side not as partner but competitor."

Robert Vernick -- Management of Next-Gen Games Art Outsourcing

"EA is also looking for employees in China but we don’t always find those who are qualified; most of the applicants focus on online games instead of next-generation games. EA is rather generous when looking at the "brain drain": sometimes losing a talented employee may not be all bad, as very soon he may not be that important for the company. New members should be constantly recruited for a team. Even if the employee goes to work for one of the company’s partners, it would be beneficial for future communication and cooperation between the two enterprises. Of course, EA is very cautious about getting an employee from partners: that would be too dangerous.

As for team building, don’t be afraid to spend money on problems; A team should concentrate on how to obstacles, instead of stepping over it."

Tommy Xia -- Demand Management of Whole-game Outsourcing for Online Game

"One of the key factors for problems in game development is that people on different positions have their own understanding about games: investors think that games are products and need to be unique; producers regard games as a process of model building, seeing it as a combination of various factors; project managers, however, deem games as a toy; while for planners, games are scripts that are based on imagination; programmers at the same time see logic and technology in games; and art designers insist that games are pieces of art."

Ed Trillo -- Outsourcing: The Fast Track to Success

"‘Outsourcing’ seems to be a negative word in the US. In partnerships, we don’t use the word ‘outsourcing’. Then how do we call it? We call it ‘integrated development’; in other words, outsourcing means the final integration.

"As for providing description of requirements and basic statistics, there should be a balanced ambiguity -- ‘Ambiguity is enemy’: partners should not be allowed to work with too much ambiguity or else there would be very low efficiency. At the same time, ‘too much information can backfire’ -- providing too much information won’t work either; with too little ambiguity, the results would not match out expectations. So the key is ‘be precise and to the point’, which could be quite difficult. People with experience working in an outsourcing company would say ‘face-time makes a difference …’. It would be much better to have someone there at a partner’s place; in other words, the ‘24-24 rule’ ("24 hours vs 24 seconds"). Though the words may be a little extreme, the effect and result will tell you that this is the way it is."

CGDC harvested a fair amount of industry wisdom based on speeches and discussions that the Committee is sorting out to be offered and shared with the general public in due course.

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