The global game development market is estimated at $10 billion. It is an aggressive and competitive market as developers are under constant pressure to leverage emerging technologies, improve time-to-market for new games, and constantly reduce costs. The market concerns are exacerbated by the potential for theft of new games or technology, sometimes even before products reach market. Piracy of popular games is estimated at over $2 billion annually.

While most global destinations offer creative and technical talent for game development, the balance of cost against quality differs dramatically across countries. Leading developers use multiple global locations, and are increasingly re-evaluating the cost-benefit of emerging geographies. Developers are looking three to five years into the future for the locations that can provide competitive advantages. While the current leaders of this this sector of outsourcing are India, China, Russia, countries such as Vietnam, Ukraine, Korea and Romania show promise of building and sustaining viable game-development communities for both outsourcing and stand-alone game creation.

Types of Skills
Game development requires a complex combination of skills that include artistic capabilities such as texturing, modeling and animation, and technical skills such as coding, testing and porting. To assess competitiveness, among other things, game developers continually benchmark salaries between geographies. Benchmarking compensation for such a wide range of skills is costly and unfeasible. The task is further complicated since each job function has various levels of experience (beginner, intermediate or advanced) that work on a project.

In a global services model, the costs will also assume ratios of staff that are offshore versus onsite, usually this is about 8:1 for offshore to onsite team members. 

Many executives have pre-conceived notions (game developers are not exempt) about cities, regions or geographies that are superior or ideal. These observations can come from magazine or newspaper articles, perhaps a conference or even discussions with peers. One CFO returned from a conference and mandated that the team assess global services, not to save money or pursue a defined strategy, but because the CFO was tired of not having an “offshore story to tell.”