Producers' Guide to External Game Development
- Rob Sandberg
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
When you think about being a game producer, the first thing that usually comes to mind is standing in the middle of a room, or on a Zoom call, directly managing your own team. You’re there with the artists, designers, and programmers every day. You know who’s having a bad week and who’s about to crush a milestone.
But here’s the reality: at some point in your career, you’re going to step outside that bubble. You’ll either become an external producer yourself or, more likely, you’ll be an internal producer whose neck is on the line for work happening three time zones away.
External game development isn't just outsourcing. It’s a completely different animal that changes how you spend your time and where you place your focus. It is also where projects go to die if you don't understand why they fail.
The Root Causes of Game Outsourcing Failures
Most failures in co-production or outsourcing don't happen because people are lazy. They happen because of a small set of root causes that appear early and persist. If you can spot these, you have a chance. If you ignore them, you're just waiting for the crash.
1. Misaligned Goals and Win Conditions
This is the most common silent killer. A publisher usually wants speed and low costs. The external agency might be optimizing for billable hours or trying to build a portfolio piece. If your "win conditions" differ, you're pulling in opposite directions from day one.
The same applies to the money. If the revenue share or milestone terms are lopsided, one side will eventually under-invest or start cutting corners to survive. You need to make sure that if you win, they win too.
2. The Scope Trap and Planning Failures
A vague scope is a recipe for crunch. If your pre-production is weak and your schedule is optimistic, you've already lost. External teams often get handed unstable designs or late feature changes without any adjustment to the budget or the clock. This guarantees a drop in quality. You can't ask for a miracle and expect a polished game.
3. Structural Silos and Decision Rights
Many organizations treat external partners like separate factories. Design, engineering, and art work in silos with heavy handoffs and slow feedback loops. This is a nightmare for a producer.
Even worse is when nobody knows who owns the vision. If it's unclear who can cut a feature or who approves the final quality bar, the day-to-day work becomes a series of guesses. You need to define who talks to whom and who makes the hard calls before the first asset is built.
4. Poor Production and Leadership
Weak production management leads to overruns. If leadership avoids hard calls, like cutting a feature that isn't working or renegotiating a contract that is failing, the problems just compound. These issues don't fix themselves. They stay terminal until someone has the guts to kill a doomed project or change the plan.
5. Money and Cash Flow Control
Deals often don't cover the real cost of development or live operations. Some studios need unrealistic sales just to break even. If the partner controls the cash flow and the money arrives too slowly, even a successful game can sink a talented studio.
6. Execution Issues vs. Market Failures
Sometimes a game underperforms because its concept is bad, not because it was built poorly. There might be no clear audience or the timing is just wrong. In these cases, producers often ask external teams to "add more content" or "polish the UI." You can't fix a fundamentally weak concept with more polish. That’s just throwing good money after bad.
7. Team Cohesion and Communication
Time zones and language gaps cause intent to be lost. You might think you gave a clear spec, but the build shows something totally different. Without a shared "definition of done," one side thinks they’re finished while the other is unhappy. This leads to rework, frustration, and a total breakdown in trust.
8. Contract and Partnership Flaws
A one-sided contract encourages short-term survival behavior. If the developer has to eat every overrun while the publisher can walk away easily, the developer won't focus on long-term quality. Rigid milestones also push teams to hit dates rather than validating whether the game is actually fun or fits the market.
How to Evaluate an External Game Development Partner
When you are shopping for a partner, don't just look at the portfolio. Pretty pictures are easy to buy. You need to look at the plumbing of their operation. A partner who looks great in a pitch deck can still be a disaster in production if they don't have a delivery system.
Real-Time Visibility
Ask them how they track work. If the answer is "we'll send you a report every Friday," walk away. You need a partner who uses a shared visual board where you can see exactly where an asset is at any moment. You shouldn't have to call a meeting to check the status of a prop or feature.
Data Over Guesses
Vague progress percentages like "we're 70% done" are useless. Look for a partner that talks in terms of asset age. They should know exactly how long a task has been sitting in progress. Risk in game development is tied to time. The longer something sits half-finished, the more likely it is to break when it finally hits your engine. A good partner swarms ageing work to get it finished rather than letting it rot while they start new tasks.
A Stable Heartbeat
You want a partner with a consistent throughput. They should be able to tell you how many assets they deliver every week. This stable pulse enables your technical art and QA teams to plan their own schedules. If a studio delivers nothing for three weeks and then drops 50 assets on your desk at once, they are failing you.
Honest Forecasting
Avoid studios that promise "best-effort" deadlines for everything. Look for the ones that use their own historical data to give you a range. If they can say 85% of their environment props are ready in ten days or less, you can actually build a production schedule around that. That is math, not optimism.
The Discipline to Break Work Down
A high-quality partner won't let a massive, complex task sit in their pipeline for a month. They will break it into smaller, engine-ready bits. This keeps the flow moving and gives you something to integrate every few days. If they don't have the discipline to right-size their work, you will end up with a massive integration nightmare at the end of the milestone.
How It Changes Your Day Job
If you're used to coaching a small pod, external dev is going to be a shock. Your role shifts from facilitator to bridge.
First, you become a Specs Specialist. If an external team gets a vague ticket, they might spend three days building the wrong thing. You have to be precise and over-communicate.
Second, you’re now a Risk Manager. You aren't just looking at burnout. You’re looking at hardware shipping delays and time zone overlaps. Your buffer becomes your best friend.
Finally, your Accountability shifts. You aren't just accountable for the team, you’re accountable for the outcomes. If the partner fails, it’s your failure. You can’t just say they didn't follow the contract. You’re the one who was supposed to make sure they did.
The Bottom Line
External game development is a tool, not a cheat code. It can help you scale, but it requires a leader who manages with clarity and consistency. You have to trade your management by walking around for management by alignment.
Get it right, and you’re a force multiplier. Get it wrong, and you’re just managing an expensive disaster.