Game Outsourcing Questions, Answered

Most writing about game outsourcing answers a keyword. This section answers questions. Every page below starts from something a developer, publisher or founder actually asked, and the first sentence under each heading is the answer rather than a preamble about how the industry is changing.

The questions are procurement questions, so they get procurement answers. How co-development differs from full outsourcing, and what that changes in your producer's week. What a Nintendo Switch port realistically takes in months. Which QA vendors operate at publisher scale and why certification testing is priced differently from functional testing. What a 50,000-word script costs to translate per language. How to separate two shortlisted studios when both portfolios look fine. Each answer names rate bands, timelines, contract clauses and the specific questions to put to a studio before signing anything.

Two rules govern what appears here. Directory figures are first-party and read live: when a page says a given number of studios list QA testing, that count comes from the database at render time, not from a press release. Hourly rates are a different matter. No directory holds trustworthy rate data, including this one, so every rate figure on these pages is an editorial market range and is labeled as one. Where something could not be verified it is left out instead of filled in, which is why you will not find invented client lists or case studies here.

Each page pairs its written answers with a live list of studios that match the topic, pulled from the directory when the page loads. Read the answer, look at who can actually do the work, then filter the full directory by service, engine, platform and country to build a shortlist. If you would rather start from a curated list, the best-of pages cover the same ground discipline by discipline, and the blog holds the long-form cost and process guides these answers condense.