Game Outsourcing Studio Rankings (2026)

How this ranking is built

Position comes from one number, and that number is the sum of two things. The first is the studio's size and how long it has been in business, which sets the highest score it can reach. The second is how completely its listing is filled in — the description, the portfolio, the location, the disciplines, the engines — which decides how close to that ceiling it actually gets. Nothing else is an input, and paying us is not one of them.

The completeness half is worth more than the size half, deliberately. A large studio with a half-empty listing is outranked by a smaller one that has filled its profile in, and the only way for the biggest studios to reach the top of these pages is to do the same. Each part of the profile also stops paying once it is answered: the fifth discipline a studio lists counts, the fourteenth does not, so the order cannot be climbed by ticking every box on the form.

Paid placement does not affect this ranking. Featured placement is sold on this site, it carries a Featured badge wherever it appears, and it cannot move a studio a single position here. Elsewhere it can: the best-of lists and the browse pages sort paid listings above unpaid ones, and they say so. These ranking pages are the exception, which is the only reason they are worth citing.

The list is mechanical, not editorial. It is produced by sorting a column. Nobody here has interviewed these studios, audited their work or vouched for them, and the great majority of listings have never been claimed by the studio that owns them. A high position says a studio is large, established and thoroughly listed. It is not a statement about the quality of its work, and it is not a recommendation.

Only the top 10 of a list get a position, or its top quarter, whichever is smaller. Coming tenth out of twelve is not a placement worth publishing, so no position below the cut is shown anywhere on this site. Studios below it are listed alphabetically with no number attached, and so are listings too sparse to score at all. Unranked means we know too little about a studio to place it, not that it is a poor one.

Every input is self-declared. Studios tell us their headcount, their founding year and what they do, and nothing here verifies any of it — a studio can overstate its size, and a small team that writes a thorough listing will outrank a larger one that has not. So the order rewards being established and being thoroughly described, which is not the same as being good at the work. That is the honest limit of this ranking, and the reason to open the profiles and the studios' own sites rather than stopping at the order on this page. If anything recorded for your studio is wrong, claim the listing and tell us. These pages are regenerated hourly from the live directory.