Epic Games has formed a Shanghai-ased outsourcing division to come up with assets for its games, as well as third-party developers. The idea is to use the skilled communist working class to cheaply make assets that you normally have to pay twice as much for if you hire an American or stinking European.
How well is it going to work? I'll let American McGee answer that question, talking about the advantages of using English-illiterate meat puppets with no autonomy of their own to help develop a game.
U.S. game development teams are really creative, brilliant, innovative—and they're really headstrong. A guy that I'd hire to be a junior artist would try to force an idea into a game and hijack the production, throwing a major monkey wrench into the process. That's the Western development team. It's the opposite with the Chinese team. If you come up with a good idea and you give them good direction, they'll stamp it out. Problem is, they will not deviate a f***in' inch from what I say. So the challenge is coming up with enough of a good idea, and...like, I find my days are now 80 percent just giving directions. And it's really frustrating and really annoying and boring, but it works. Otherwise, I've had people following orders until there was nothing else to do. They just sit there and stare at the screen.
How well did employing brainless automatons with no inspiration of their own to help balance out American's pedestrian 'vision' work out for him? Check it out for yourselves.
Epic Games forms Shanghai-based outsourcing division [Gamesindustry.biz]
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