Game Development Outsourcing for Studios That Ship

A dedicated pod is billed monthly like a team extension — you direct the work, we staff and manage the people, and the engagement can run indefinitely. Project-based outsourcing is scoped and fixed-price against a defined deliverable — a feature, a platform port, a full game — with milestone payments. Studios with an established production process usually prefer pods for flexibility; studios without in-house game engineering usually prefer project-based for cost certainty. We will recommend based on how much day-to-day direction you want to provide.

Dedicated pods are priced by team size, seniority mix, and specialization, billed monthly for as long as the engagement runs. Project-based engagements are driven by genre, art scope, platform targets, and feature depth, and are fixed-price against a defined deliverable with milestone payments. We quote a specific number after scoping your actual project.

An NDA is signed before we see the design document or any prototype, standard work-for-hire contract terms assign you full IP ownership of everything delivered, and for publisher-facing engagements we can put source code in escrow. We work under NDA with unannounced titles regularly and treat concept confidentiality as a baseline requirement, not an add-on.

Yes, and we start with an honest codebase and asset audit before quoting anything — some rescue projects need a light cleanup and continuation, others have accumulated enough technical debt that a partial rebuild of specific systems is genuinely faster than patching forward. We will tell you which situation yours is rather than defaulting to the answer that is easiest to sell.

No — in every engagement model, creative direction stays with you unless you explicitly want us to own it, as in full outsourced production for a client without internal game design expertise. For pods and co-development, we execute against your design documentation and playtest feedback, with regular builds specifically so you can course-correct early rather than discovering a direction problem at the end of a milestone.

Two weeks from signed scope to first sprint for a standard pod composition, faster if you need to start with a smaller team and scale up. The variable is usually how quickly we can get access to your repositories, asset libraries and existing documentation — we can start staffing in parallel with that access being set up.