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Outsourcer Frequent Questions
Can I outsource for you?Yes. We want to contract outsourcing companies to provide prototyping and production services. What do you look for in an outsourcing company?We want to see that you do good work and are stable. We need outsourcers to be professional in demeanor, and have a website demonstrating their work (links to working demos are also great on that site). Your key people should be talented, naturally. If you own your own game engine, or have demonstrated expertise with certain engines or middleware sets, that also helps. We can work with "we do everything under the sun" shops for some projects. We can also work with companies with a strong aesthetic or technology focus. We want to get a sense the direction of your people and your company. Sometimes location is a factor as well. If a core team for a particular project has set up in, say, Chicago, then being in Chicago helps. We also need to know that you can communicate well with us and our core talent. One thing we are not necessarily interested in is whether you are the cheapest. We don't confuse outsourcing with offshoring. We use outsourcing as a means to get the best available people on any given project on any given time—to handpick core team members for their skills and aesthetic outlook. What do outsourcers do for you?Upon purchase of a game design—which happens if we are greenlighting it—we hire outsourcing companies to bring the game into pre-production (consisting of expanding cycles of prototyping), and then into full production. Outsourcers do build the game using their expertise, but they also help shape it creatively. In fact, we will solicit your opinion whether or not you believe certain designs can work or not before we greenlight them, and this may influence what projects get approved. So in a sense, outsourcers become stars in this new game-making process as well, much the way actors in the film industry can help determine which screenplays are going to be made. What do outsourcers sell to you?This is negotiable. Usually we arrange to own all the IP an outsourcer makes for us on the contracted game project. If, however, an outsourcer is using its own engine or other technology, we will usually license that as middleware, the outsourcer thus retaining ownership over any code written for their own middleware on our project, on top of being paid for their work. Again, our interest is more in owning the actual game we are making together—the original branding and content—than new technology. Where is a game actually built?It depends. During the option period and any early prototyping of a design, there is no single office or production facility. The core team and any outsourcers usually work from their own locations, over the Internet, while Core Team Games works from its offices. If these parties happen to be close together, that is helpful. Upon entering later pre-production and full production, we usually arrange for the core team to work from a centralized temporary office. Any outsourcers usually work from their own location, though key members of those outsourcing companies may work at the core talent's temporary location, or Core Talent Games' offices. If my company outsources for you, can it also submit a design?We treat those as separate processes. What starts the ball rolling with us on a new game project is a design submission, not an outsourcer relationship. We very much prefer to accept design submissions from core talent individuals, not from companies. The only time we will work with a company as a core design submitter is if the company is so small it is indivisible from the core talent—it is the core talent. If somebody inside your company wants to submit a design to us, they may, but there may be internal issues with you. We treat this as a design submission from them, and we do a contract with them. That means they need to own what they make, and they need to convince us of that. If your company can work out an amicable arrangement with potential core talent members within it—if those people can be located physically inside your company, paying you rent or whatever, while working for themselves—that's another matter. The bottom line is we want to work with individual creators and these submitters have to convince us they own their design work. But if you do it this way, upon purchase it becomes a little easier for us to contract your company as an outsourcer to do pre-production and production: the core talent is already at your location now. (Sid Meier designed Civilization according to a similar model—he was a contractor inside Microprose, not an employee.) What project management methodology do you use?This varies by the phase of the project. In early stages we use a very informal process. People work from their own locations in a low-rush, low-judgement design and prototyping phase. When we get into pre-production we progress the project through larger and larger cycles of prototyping—using Spiral and Agile methodologies—until arriving at a vertical slice that delivers the gameplay we are all looking for. We end pre-production then enter full production: a scheduled, tight production phase, with clearly delineated deliverables and timetables—using a "waterfall" methodology. Can individual free agents work as outsourcers for you?Yes. You don't need to be a big company. Will you make your group healthcare available to free agent outsourcers?If you are an individual free agent who is hired as an outsourcer for us, and you are in the US, you will be eligible to participate in our planned group healthcare. Again, we want to promote free agency in the game industry. If you begin to hire on people, and thus become a fully-staffed company in your own right, you'll need to take care of that issue on your own. |
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