Streamlining Production
Hector Fernandez explains in detail what he and his brother are up to these days
I think that you're always going to come down to two camps: The people that are believers, and the people that are nay-sayers - it's polarised, and I think that's because those people who are experienced in doing outsourcing well tend to say they can handle it themselves.
But the other 95 per cent who have experienced it not really working tend to look at this as a real solution. Typically when you're developing your product you look at your outsourcing strategy on a profit and loss basis - you do your numbers and allocate a percentage of budget that's going to get outsourced. You know that you're going to need to dedicate internal resources - and outsource manager - an art director, someone to sit there and review the actual work.
But what tends to happen, because of the way that people plan that work, is that those resources almost instantaneously become absorbed just trying to take care of the internal production, and there isn't the time to orchestrate the external vendor.
What people need is expertise, and a pipeline that can work as a production studio - not only capable of being able to review, manage, QA and QC the work, but can actually set them up with the appropriate vendors, saving them time and money going out the gate.
This doesn't mean that they don't have internal expertise that can provide them the right vendor - but it's a question of whether they have the time, because the true cost of outsourcing hidden from the P&L is that person's time. If you have to send them to go on-site to work with the other company, whether it's India or China or wherever, to triangulate your specifications and criteria - you're only increasing the amount of costs for that production anyway.
If you go to experts who literally do that every day for a living... Our pipeline is always turned on - just through default and process of execution, our experience can deliver what they need quicker. Most people are able to see that, if not at first glance, after our first delivery.
In traditional outsourcing, 25 per cent of the managerial effort is equal to 100 per cent of the total cost. What tends to happen to outsourcing budgets is waste through inexperience of the vendor and client to align and verify expectations - and it costs a lot to make content.
Quality costs - and if you just look at how complicated it is to create a videogame a lot of people are doing Scrum, iterative design - but managing the art profit and loss as an ongoing cost.
I've given talks about this over the years, called Engineering Art - actually planning your art to essentially be successful and you don't have so much waste through effective re-use in planning of production themes.
There are different techniques to being able to handle it - the more you do it, the more you realise that it's not rocket science... but it is a smart production technique, and if you don't think about it every day it's easy for a lot of that to get lost.
It's a fixed fee - based on a man-month, the amount of resources we need to be able to be on the project and basically conduct the orchestra, and just charge on top of that.
f they're working with a preferred vendor that they like, in China or wherever, we just come in and hook up with them. We make sure that the process in which they're delivering their content fits inside of the pipeline for delivery to the client - literally being able to take internal and external pipelines and integrate them. That's the magic.