GamesIndustry.biz’s ExDev Week Asks: Should Outsourcing Studios Build Their Own Games?
Should the studios that spend their careers building other people’s games ever risk their own money on original ideas? That’s the question at the heart of “ExDev Week,” a themed editorial series just launched by trade outlet GamesIndustry.biz, which is dedicating a full week to the external development sector — the porting houses, co-dev partners and asset studios that quietly prop up much of the AAA industry.
The site is looking at external development, spotlighting the hardworking studios that often have a major hand in designing some of the world’s biggest games, but that rarely get to take a bow in the limelight. Among the themes GamesIndustry.biz says it set out to explore is one that cuts to the core of the sector’s identity: balancing work-for-hire projects against creating original IP, as well as the importance of building trust with clients.
Why External Development Is Suddenly Central to the Conversation
The timing is no accident. The games industry has been undergoing an unprecedented transformation over the past few years, with thousands of job losses at the biggest companies in the wake of spiralling budgets and tumbling profit margins. That backdrop has pushed outsourcing further into the spotlight as publishers look for ways to avoid repeating painful hire-and-fire cycles.
External development has increasingly been framed as the fix. As GamesIndustry.biz’s editorial team puts it in its series introduction, the model is often pitched as a more sustainable alternative to hiring huge internal teams that later face redundancy once a project ships and there is little left for them to do. The question the outlet poses for the rest of the week is whether that ideal holds up, and what role original games should play in a studio built primarily to serve other people’s projects.
Winking Studios’ Claude Bordeleau: “More Strategic, More Integrated”
As part of the series, GamesIndustry.biz canvassed senior figures across the external development space on where the sector is heading next, and their answers speak directly to the own-IP dilemma. “The future of external development will be more strategic, more integrated, and increasingly central to how games are made,” says Claude Bordeleau of Winking Studios, one of the largest external game development studios in the world, as reported by GameDev.net’s write-up of the feature. Bordeleau is also a member of the External Development Summit (XDS) advisory committee, and was previously a director at Keywords Studios.
Bordeleau notes that in the short term, the market is still digesting the over-expansion of the last few years, with budgets under pressure, greenlights harder to secure, and many publishers being more cautious. But longer term, he believes external development will continue to grow, driven by the simple reality that games are not getting simpler — players expect more content, more platforms, better live support and higher production values, and very few companies want to maintain every capability internally at the level required.
Code Wizards Group Floats a Movie-Style Financing Model
Not every voice in the piece sees a straightforward path of growth for service studios that stick purely to contract work. Stuart Muckley of Code Wizards Group suggests the industry is drifting toward movie-style project financing, where each game may be spun out into its own legal entity, most development would be outsourced, risk would be pushed onto service providers, and specialist exdev teams would be brought in and offboarded as needed.
That scenario would hand external studios more work in the short term, but it also raises the stakes around ownership. If a studio’s entire pipeline is built around being hired and released project-by-project, having no original title of its own to fall back on between contracts becomes a much riskier proposition than it already is.
Work-for-Hire as a Funding Bridge to Original Games
This isn’t a new dilemma for studio owners, even if ExDev Week is giving it fresh prominence. Industry body Flanders DC has previously made the case that contract work and original development are not opposites but complements: taking on assignments from other companies as well as working on your own IP helps keep a studio in good financial shape, since work-for-hire buys time and money to keep working on original projects.
That framing lines up with what GamesIndustry.biz’s sources describe: external development isn’t necessarily a trap that stops a studio from ever making its own game, but for many teams it is the only way to keep the lights on long enough to eventually try.
An Uncomfortable Choice for Smaller, Service-Driven Studios
For smaller and mid-sized studios across the Asia-Pacific region — many of which built their reputations on contract art, porting, QA and co-development before ever attempting an original release — the debate GamesIndustry.biz has opened up will feel familiar. Diversifying into original IP offers upside and creative control, but it also means competing for player attention and marketing budget against studios that never have to answer to a client’s deadline.
What ExDev Week makes clear is that there’s no single right answer circulating among the sector’s own leaders. Some, like Bordeleau, see external development maturing into a deeper, more trusted partnership model that could reduce the pressure to gamble on originals at all. Others, like Muckley, see a future where owning nothing and being hired for everything becomes the norm — making the decision to build a game of your own either a luxury or a necessary insurance policy, depending on which studio you ask.
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