Game development outsourcing guides

This is a library of working guides on hiring outside studios to build games, written for the person who has to run the engagement. Each one answers a question that comes up before money changes hands: what a discipline costs, which region fits your schedule, whether you want a full-cycle build or co-development inside your own repo, and how to tell a studio that ships from a studio with a good reel.

Read them in the order the decision actually happens. Cost comes first, because a budget decides which regions and which team sizes are even on the table. Engagement model comes next: a single art package, a full-cycle build, or co-development where their engineers commit to your project. Region follows, since it sets your daily overlap and most of the price difference between two studios with similar reels. Engine and platform guides come last, at the point where you are comparing named studios rather than categories.

Every number in these guides is a market range by discipline and seniority, drawn from published rates and what studios quote. They are not directory figures. Studios listed on this site do not publish hourly rates, so treat any range as the starting point for a conversation rather than a price you can hold someone to. Where a guide gives a worked example, it says what assumptions went into it.

When you are done reading and want names, the category lists filter the verified directory by discipline, engine, platform and team size, and the full directory lets you combine those filters in one place. The free tools turn the ranges in these guides into a number for your own scope.