“Outsourcing is kind of a crap industry,” says Barry Meade, co-founder of Fireproof Studios. “It doesn’t really serve much of a purpose beyond helping people get stuff out the door. It’s a bit passive and parasitic as far as we’re concerned.”

Fireproof says it can do outsourcing better – and it’s a pretty credible claim when you consider the team’s pedigree. “As a group we’d been together for five-plus years as the art team at Criterion Games,” Meade explains. “We were basically the world art leads for Burnout 3, Revenge and Paradise, and we worked on Black as well. After Paradise it became clear to us that it was likely that we would get broken up as a team. We just didn’t want that: we’d been working together for so long and so well and we had so much applied knowledge. At Criterion we always ran our team autonomously anyway. We hired and trained our own people, designed our own tools, scheduled our work and tracked that ourselves. So we did pretty much everything anyway – what I mean is, we were almost a going concern at Criterion. And we just wanted to stay together.”

The solution was to transplant the team into the outsourcing world as specialists in environmental art – and in doing so they hope to offer something considerably more than the usual assets sweatshop. Although it still has the majority of its ongoing projects under wraps, the group got to flex its muscles with LittleBigPlanet’s downloadable content, creating the backdrops and level furniture for the Metal Gear Solid 4 pack. The results point to a team as much involved in design as it is pixel pushing, and it’s further clear from the work the staff did on Burnout Paradise that creating world art means more than simply making things pretty.

“The ethic with artwork at Criterion was that it always had to have a function,” says Meade, chuckling at the very notion of art uninformed by design. “You can’t just put it in because it looks nice – it has to be worth something to the player. We designed the layout of Paradise City, we designed the layout of the roads, we designed all of the jumps and tricks, all of the shortcuts, all of the off-road elements like the airstrips and quarry and all these areas. The entire world, from design to pre-production to whiteboxing to production and then finally to lighting and post-production, we did everything. So it was an awful lot of responsibility, but I think probably that’s what sets us out, that we really see ourselves as game developers as well as artists.”

Now they’re asking to take on that degree of responsibility for other developers – not merely turning out a few textures or wireframes, but offering to grapple with hugely significant portions of the overall project. It’s not a trivial request. As Meade recalls, their early pitches were met with shock: “We were effectively asking people to give us work that they would normally only ever do in-house. They would never release that kind of responsibility to a random bunch of artists somewhere in the world who don’t really care about the game that’s being made. And I think this is a problem with outsourcing teams in general. [In the past, developers] would tend to give outsourcing studios a list of assets and say: ‘When these are all done we’ll pay you’. And that’s fine for what it is, but the artists aren’t net contributors to the quality of the game or player experience. We’re basically saying to people, you can hire us and think and act as if we were in-house, because we think and act and work like that anyway.”

By contrast, though certainly a cheap means of producing assets, the existing model of outsourcing is far from efficient, burning up a lot of in-house development time supervising the progress of external teams. It’s an issue that Fireproof encountered at Criterion. “When we were on Burnout Paradise we had 50 outsourcers working for us in India,” says Meade. “On the whole they did a good job, but it required two senior guys to be on it full time – this was on a team of nine or ten senior people – two of them full-time for the whole project were looking after outsourcing, whether they were writing documents or actually overseeing work as it came in. And then, to top it all, the outsourcers didn’t really add anything. In fact they were just quite difficult, because we had to process everything they did and try to fit it in with what we were doing and review it.

“We think there’s room for a new model and for us that model is based on the way the Hollywood studio system works. If a producer wants to make a particular movie they would hire a director of photography, and then the DP would have his crew. They’re hired explicitly because they’re experts. Not because they’re cheap or they’re cheaper than their in-house guys. They’re hired because everybody knows if you hire ILM, you’ll probably get the best CG in the world; everybody knows if you hire this DP, you’ll probably get the best cinematography. And we want that model to come to games. In fact, we believe it has to come to games because the system doesn’t really work as it is – it’s actually a bit expensive and creatively a bit knackering for the industry.”

Meade talks a good game – but the litmus test is the return trade. Media Molecule has continued its relationship with Fireproof for subsequent DLC packs, and Meade reports that other clients are coming back to the team, willing to dole out more responsibility. “We’re not just a passive factor,” he explains. “We want to play an active role as much as we can, bring our own design chops and practical skills to what we’re doing. We think it actually makes us better because we work on more stuff, we have to chop and change quicker, deal with different clients – so it keeps you on your toes, you know?”

Facing hard times, the game industry is looking to tighten its belt, but Meade suggests that if it wants to start making money again, the answer isn’t to hack budgets back but to entrust development to people who know how to make top-selling games.

This is an edited version of an article that appeared in E203.
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