It’s not uncommon to know very little about how video games are made — they are, after all, typically enormously complex years-long endeavors worked on by hundreds if not thousands of people. But one particularly overlooked aspect of the game industry is co-development, studios that specialize in doing a lot of the heavy lifting, partnering with major studios on some of the biggest games around. Among co-development studios, few are as big as Virtuos — which recently developed Oblivion Remastered alongside Bethesda.
“There’s a fairly solid consensus around the idea that smaller core teams lead to more creativity. The problem then is, how do you get a small team to produce enough content within a reasonable time frame, a couple years instead of a decade, without killing themselves crunching,” Virtuos CEO Gilles Langourieux tells Inverse, “There’s a question around scalability, and what co-development does is provide extra scalability and flexibility to the creators. By working with co-development, studios can scale faster and produce the amount of content that is required to ship the game faster.”
.jpg?w=600)
