Ustwo Games to think about hiring extra contractors to scale back growth prices

Following its shift to a PC-first technique, Ustwo Games CEO Maria Sayans stated the studio should dramatically cut back growth budgets by relying extra on contractors.

CEO Maria Sayans advised Game Developer that earlier than leaving cellular, the UK studio developed titles with budgets of £7 million to £10 million and manufacturing cycles of three to 4 years.

“We need to lower that,” stated Sayans. “For example, if we did something like Alba or Assemble With Care, we would have to do that for a lot less money. There are people doing really, really well in those spaces on PC for much smaller budgets, that we will never be able to achieve because we’re based in London and have employees with pensions and so on.”

Ustwo at the moment employs about 30 folks, with staffing growing to 40 in the course of the growth of Monument Valley 3.

“We’ve been a little bit too romantic about the idea that we should have employees and give people long-term job security,” Mayans defined.

“I think that got us into a place where, reaching the heights of Monument Valley 3 [production], contractors were always a relatively low percentage of our employee base. I think that’s something we’re looking to change going forward.”

“We’ll see that we’ve got a core team and any growth will come through contractors, which is something I hate about the industry. I’ve been in the industry for 20 years, and those of us who joined in the early 2000s, we had it very good. You want to be able to give that kind of stability […] but I think that’s a shift in how we want to work with people.”

Sayans famous that increasing contract hires and co-development groups will improve flexibility and assist management budgets.

She additionally really useful launching video games at larger costs and providing reductions later to assist the studio’s sustainability.

“This is not going to be a very popular thing with players, but the truth is you have a cohort of people—your day one players—who are most likely to be your core fans for whom the difference between £5 and £10 [is going to be negligible].”