What platform certification experience should a publisher check for?
Ask which platforms the studio has personally submitted to, how recently, and whether the accounts and SDK access were theirs or the client's. Console submission needs developer accounts, platform SDKs under NDA, and someone who has cleared a technical requirements checklist before, and the third is the rare part. A studio that has shipped through certification knows the lead times, the common rejection reasons and how long a resubmission takes. Ask how many submissions passed first time and what failed on the ones that did not. Porting and certification experience travel together, so a porting record is a useful proxy.
How do publishers assess an external studio's real capacity?
Capacity is what remains after the studio's other contracts, not the headcount on its website. Ask what else is in production during your window, which named people are assigned to you and at what percentage, how many of them are already committed elsewhere, and what the studio's hiring plan assumes. A studio that intends to recruit into your contract is selling you its recruitment risk. Ask about the bench: who covers a lead's absence, and how quickly. Then size the first milestone so a staffing shortfall shows up in the first weeks rather than at the end of the schedule.
What security and pipeline requirements do publishers impose?
Publishers commonly require named-individual NDAs, controlled source access rather than a shared repository dump, network or physical separation for the project, restrictions on personal devices and consumer cloud storage, and audited handling of pre-release builds and art. Many also require the studio to work inside the publisher's own build, bug-tracking and asset systems rather than exporting into them. Ask early, because these are the requirements that eliminate otherwise capable studios: a team that has never worked under a build embargo will not pass an audit in the weeks before a contract starts. Studios that have served publishers have the answers written down already.
How are milestone contracts structured with external studios?
A milestone contract ties payment to defined, acceptance-tested deliverables on fixed dates, with a written review window and a cure period when a milestone is rejected. What matters in practice is who signs off acceptance, how long the publisher has to review before a milestone counts as accepted, and what happens to the schedule when a review runs late. Include a change-request mechanism with pricing agreed in advance, because scope will move. Keep source files and documentation as milestone deliverables, so payment and handover stay in step through the project instead of colliding at the end.
How do publishers weigh co-development against work-for-hire?
Work-for-hire buys a defined deliverable and keeps the pipeline closed: the studio returns a port, an art package or a QA cycle against a specification. Co-development opens the pipeline, since the external team commits into the project repository and works to the same milestones as the internal team, which buys capacity and shared schedule ownership at the cost of access, onboarding and daily management. Publishers usually run work-for-hire for anything specifiable and reserve co-development for long engagements where the work cannot be separated from the codebase. Game co-development explained sets out the difference.
How do publishers build and use an approved vendor list?
Most publishers keep an approved-vendor list per discipline, built from studios that have already cleared legal, security and finance review and refreshed from post-mortems after each project. Getting onto one usually means passing a compliance review and then a small first contract rather than winning a pitch. Multi-service groups such as Keywords Studios, Virtuos and PTW appear on many of these lists because one approval covers several disciplines. Specialists get on by referral from a producer who has used them. Ask a candidate studio which publishers have approved them, and for which discipline.
