Outsourcing Unreal and Unity game development: an engine-specific guide
Most advice about outsourcing game development treats the engine as a footnote. It is not. A studio that is excellent at Unity mobile work can be mediocre in Unreal, and a team of Unreal C++ veterans may struggle to ship a tight 2D Unity build on a budget. The engine shapes the codebase, the asset pipeline, how you store files, and which questions actually separate a strong vendor from a portfolio reel. This guide assumes you have already picked your engine. The job now is hiring the right people for it.
If you are still deciding between the two, our Unity vs Unreal comparison covers that choice. Everything below is about what to do once the engine is locked.
Unreal: where the work and the risk live
Unreal projects split across two layers, and the split matters when you hand work to an outside team. Blueprints handle visual scripting; C++ handles the systems underneath. A studio that lives entirely in Blueprints can prototype fast and let designers iterate without a programmer in the loop. That is genuinely useful early on. The problem shows up later. Blueprint-only projects get slow and tangled at scale, and "spaghetti Blueprints" are a real maintenance cost that you inherit if you ever bring the work in-house.
So ask about the ratio. A serious Unreal team uses C++ for core systems, performance-critical loops, and anything that needs to be testable, then exposes clean nodes to Blueprints for designers. If a vendor tells you they did a full game in Blueprints with no C++, that is fine for a small project and a warning sign for a large one. Ask them to walk you through how they decided what went where.
The asset pipeline is the second place Unreal surprises people. Unreal source projects are heavy. Uassets are binary, which means standard text-diffing source control does not help you, and the repo balloons fast once you add high-resolution textures, MetaHuman characters, and Nanite geometry. Studios that know Unreal use Perforce or Git with LFS and a lock-based workflow, because two artists editing the same binary asset cannot merge their changes the way two programmers can merge code. If a candidate studio shrugs at the source control question, they have not run a real Unreal team. That answer alone tells you a lot.
Console work raises the bar again. Shipping on PlayStation, Xbox, or Switch means platform certification, devkit access, and NDAs with the platform holders. Not every Unreal studio has done it. If your target is console, "we know Unreal" is not the same as "we have passed cert." Make them name the titles and the platforms.
Unity: the wide pool and what to watch for
Unity has the larger talent pool by a wide margin, which is good for price and bad for filtering. There are a lot of Unity studios, and quality varies more than it does in the smaller Unreal world. The first real question is the render pipeline. Unity ships three: the older Built-in pipeline, URP for performance-sensitive and mobile work, and HDRP for high-end visuals. A team that has only ever used Built-in will need ramp-up time on a URP mobile project, and that ramp-up is on your clock. Ask which pipeline their recent shipped games used.
C# is the language, and it is more forgiving than Unreal's C++, which is part of why Unity attracts more generalists. That cuts both ways. You get a deeper bench and lower rates, but you also get more people who can make something run without making it run well. For mobile especially, ask for concrete optimization results: draw call counts, build size, frame rate on mid-tier hardware they actually tested on. A studio that has shipped mobile games will have these numbers. One that has not will talk in generalities.
The Asset Store is the Unity-specific pipeline question. Plenty of good studios use store assets to move faster, and there is nothing wrong with that. What you need to know is which parts of a delivered game are bought versus built, because bought assets come with their own licenses and you do not want a surprise when you ship commercially. Ask their Asset Store policy up front, and ask whether they hand you the source project clean and buildable, not just a packaged binary.
Source control on Unity is lighter than Unreal but still trips up smaller teams. Scenes and prefabs are YAML, so they diff and merge better than uassets, but only if the studio has set Unity to text serialization and added a sane gitignore for the Library folder. A team that commits the Library folder or hands you a project with binary scene serialization has not done this at scale.
How to evaluate engine expertise without a tech background
You do not need to read C++ to vet an Unreal team. You need shipped evidence and the right questions.
Start with credits, specifically. A reel is easy to assemble from a dozen contracts, so ask which parts of a shown title the studio actually built and in which engine version. Engine versions move fast, and a team that last shipped on Unreal 4 or an old Unity LTS may be rusty on current tooling like Nanite, Lumen, or URP. Get them to name the version.
Then commission a small paid test, usually $500 to $2,000, in your engine and close to your actual work. The test tells you more than any call. You see whether the code is clean, whether the project opens and builds without a fight, whether their files drop into your pipeline the way they promised, and how they handle a revision. Communication and revision habits are the things that actually sink contracts, and a test surfaces both cheaply.
A few engine-specific questions worth asking directly:
- Unreal: What is your C++ to Blueprint split on real projects? Have you passed console certification, and on which platforms? How do you set up Perforce or Git LFS for binary assets?
- Unity: Which render pipeline did your last shipped game use? What were your mobile optimization numbers? What is your Asset Store policy, and do you deliver a clean source project?
- Both: What engine version was that title built in? Who on your team did the work, and are they still here?
That last question matters more than people admit. Studios cycle contractors, and the senior engineer whose work impressed you on the reel may not be the one assigned to your project.
What to budget
Game programming rates are the same bands across both engines, so do not let a vendor charge an Unreal premium on the engine alone. Expect $35-60 per hour at entry level, $60-120 mid-range, and $120-250 for senior engineers. The premium that exists is about people, not logos: Unreal C++ specialists and gameplay programmers with console credits cluster toward the top of each band because the pool is smaller and skews senior. General Unity C# work, especially mobile, sits lower because the supply is deep.
Region moves the number more than the engine does. A mid-range Eastern European or Latin American studio can quote roughly half what a comparable US team charges for the same seniority, and Eastern Europe in particular has unusually strong Unreal benches. Southeast Asia and India run cheaper still and are deep in Unity mobile, with the tradeoff of larger time zone gaps that demand disciplined async handoffs. For worked budget examples and project totals, see our game development outsourcing costs guide.
Two costs people forget. Budget 10 to 20 percent of project time for management, reviews, and integration on top of the engineering hours. And factor in onboarding to your specific codebase, which is real time before a contractor is productive, especially on a large Unreal project with a custom systems layer.
Where to start looking
Filter by engine before you filter by anything else, because engine fit is the constraint that is hardest to fix later. Studios with verified credits on each are listed on the Unity studios and Unreal Engine studios pages, where you can see shipped work and contact teams directly with no platform fees. For a broader shortlist across price points and disciplines, our roundup of the best game outsourcing companies is the place to start.
The mistake to avoid is treating "game developer" as one skill. Hire for the engine you are actually shipping on, make them prove it with a version number and a paid test, and check that the people who did the impressive work are the ones you will get. Get that right and the rate negotiation is the easy part.
Looking for engine-specific teams? Browse Unity studios and Unreal Engine studios in our directory of 500+ verified companies, or compare across disciplines in the best game outsourcing companies roundup.