More and more companies worldwide are choosing outsourcing studios for the art aspects of their games. There are practical considerations behind this:

• the project is carried out by specialists who own relevant technologies
• your team can focus on core tasks
• product output time is reduced and saves the budget.

Many companies find outsourcing some of their tasks difficult, but delegation actively stimulates growth. This is a boon for business in a dynamic market. To realize the full benefits of outsourcing, you need to consider many properties of contractor companies before making a decision. Due to the exceptional growth of the industry, it is important to take your time choosing a partner. Still, we have selected the 4 best game art outsourcing companies that can be trusted with almost any project.

Briefly About Modern Outsourcing

Outsourcing involves delegating certain types of work to other developers not part of the delegating company. And in general, going through certain stages of this type of cooperation, neither the customer nor the performer has any problems.

When approaching potential outsourcing partners, shorten the list of applicants by evaluating them according to the following criteria:

• Skills and abilities
• Technical Knowledge
• Experience in solving complex problems
• Mastery of the latest technologies
• Portfolio and similar tasks

Remember that technical experience is critical to the success of a programmer hires deal. Therefore, you shouldn’t choose a company whose stack is limited to a few technologies, even if they are the best in those technologies. But for example, 2D game art outsourcing in modern realities is one of the not most popular ones. Still, at the same time, all the studios from our list have the necessary skills and capabilities for implementation.

RetroStyle Games

Game art outsource for this Ukrainian studio is the main direction of their vital activity. The Internet is great, so the process of finding a potential partner does not cause any difficulties, especially with game art outsource.

The process always gets easier and faster, but it also requires more courage and trust from the main studio as they hand over certain decisions and control to the partner. The upside is that co-development allows you to get external support for parts that would be difficult to outsource – developing and organic elements, like certain features, support, or level design. As you can guess from the name, the studio is very fond of retro projects but does not limit itself to only them. In the studio’s portfolio, you can find other projects in realism or low poly modeling.

RetroStyle game outsourcing studio specializes in 3D game art outsourcing, concept art creation, 2D and 3D game icon design, modeling, animation and VFX, and sprite/logo creation.

photo credit: Francesco Ungaro / Pexels

Concept Art House

Concept Art House video game art outsourcing studio has over 400 people in every role you could expect from an AAA team. 3D artists, animators, level designers, engineers, technical artists, executives, and many others work here and are ready to provide game art outsourcing services of various levels of complexity. As in the case of RetroStyle Games, by name, you can determine the main direction – concept art, which eventually becomes full-fledged projects. You may have noticed character skins in Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and illustrations in various card games.

The fact is that Concept Art House is not a classic outsourcing studio. Instead, the company provides services to AAA studios that do not want to keep their internal developers busy with specific tasks.

N-iX Game and VR Studio

This famous game art outsourcing studio does everything from providing assets to helping with network support, porting to new platforms, and even working on specific gameplay features. Studios like N-iX Game and VR Studio allow giants like Crusader Kings III that they’ve worked with to simultaneously support multiple games as services while working on new projects while outsourcing game art to external teams.

Nuare Studio

Nuare Studio from Canada has been in the video game industry since 2006. It is known for its expertise in art style development, high and low poly 3D game art outsourcing texturing, and visual effects.

Collaborative development is still a new area, especially for the public, and there aren’t many studios specializing in this kind of work. When a development company outsources the development of important visual details to an external studio, not everyone appreciates it positively. At the same time, few companies are considering outsourcing to collaborative development. Still, Nuare Studio is one of the teams that supports the concept and bases their work around this approach because they are participants in projects such as Fallout 76 and The Last of Us.

Final Thoughts

Game art outsource needs to be approached systematically and to understand its features. At the beginning of 2023, major releases from well-known companies with the participation of outsourcers are already being prepared, which will be very successful. If you are interested in more detailed information on game art outsourcing and development, feel free to check out the source https://retrostylegames.com/blog/how-to-outsource-game-development/ from one of the studios on the list.

Of course, the list can be continued for a long time. Still, out of hundreds of other game art outsourcing companies and studios, these 4 were successful from the beginning and were honored with getting into our top.