Should you work on your own games as an external development studio?

This article is part of ExDev Week.

Earlier this year, the outsourcing company Envar Studio released its own game, Witchspire. It's just one example of external development studios turning their hand to original titles.

Projects like Witchspire can act as an advertisement for the talents of the studio behind them, as well as giving teams a creative outlet beyond working on other people's titles. But how do you balance internal projects against external work? And are they a distraction from the company's focus?

GamesIndustry.biz contacted a range of external development studios – including Airship, CodeDev, Code Wizards, Huey Games, Lab42, Pipeworks, Redcatpig, Sumo Digital, Tanglewood Games, and Third Kind Games – to ask what they think. Should you work on your own games as an external development studio?

Yes, they can co-exist

"I think it's incredibly important to work on your own projects," says Bryan Freitas, tech director at the Azores-based porting and co-development studio Redcatpig, which has created two original titles in the form of Keo and Hovershock. "There's only so much you can do to make an external project feel like your own. Work on enough of them without your ideas moving forward, and you'll drift toward demotivation fast."

"The best work tends to come from people building something they actually believe in, something that gives them real personal satisfaction," he continues. "External projects can get there too, if you're fortunate enough. Most of the time, it comes from working on your own."

João Toste, art director at Redcatpig, thinks internally made games provide valuable experience. "You see how an art choice plays out across a full production cycle, not just a slice of one," he says. "When you eventually find yourself in a project with tighter constraints and no margin for error, you already know what those mistakes look like before you make them."

"These projects give us the opportunity to apply learnings and grow our skills"

João Toste, Redcatpig

"Working on our own projects gives us the creative freedom to experiment with new styles and techniques," says Mike Sherak, managing director of the art division at Virtuos. "It also gives us firsthand experience of the complex nature of game development that our partners know all too well. These projects give us the opportunity to apply learnings and grow our skills."

Terry Goodwin, studio co-director at Lab42 – which developed A Storied Life: Tabitha, but has also worked on a wide range of external contracts – agrees that internal projects provide valuable learning opportunities. "If part of your service offering as a studio is expertise at working within or managing a product across its entire development life cycle, you need to ensure that your team not only has that end-to-end experience, but that it's kept sharp," he says.

"In external development, you rarely see out a single project from concept ideation through to launch and beyond," he continues, "so, naturally, it becomes important to find or create those opportunities yourself to gain or retain that experience."

Then again, he acknowledges the financial risk involved: "You're reliant a little bit more on success after release, as opposed to being paid purely by milestones in a work-for-hire arrangement."

"We put our clients and our external development work first"

Rob Hewson, Huey Games

Rob Hewson of Huey Games – which has ported titles like Outbound and Deliver At All Costs to consoles – says the firm's focus has always been on minimizing risk, noting that the company was founded on the philosophy "survive long enough to get lucky."

As such, although Huey Games does have its own internal projects, the number one goal is "ensuring that we always have work coming through the door," he says. "We put our clients and our external development work first. That means that we have to carefully silo off any internal prototypes that we take on to ensure that they won't impact our external services. When we do commit to an internal project, we resource it properly – it gets a dedicated team with a protected budget."

But even though relatively risk-free external development is Huey Games' main priority, Hewson acknowledges that creating original games provides useful experience. "It's only when you are making games yourself that you can continue to understand and appreciate the challenges that your clients are tackling."

Lindsay Gupton, CEO of Pipeworks – which worked on the remaster of Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee – sees the pluses and minuses of external versus internal projects. "Partner work exposes us to different pipelines, engines, production models, and creative challenges," he says. "Internal projects let us apply those lessons to opportunities where we own the full experience and can experiment."

"The balance is never about choosing between our own projects and partner projects. Both can co-exist. It is instead about making sure each side strengthens the other."

Rav Tharanee, chief strategy officer of the Virtuos studio Third Kind Games, says that his firm has always worked on original titles alongside co-development. "Each one taught us something that made us sharper on other projects," he says. "The balance works because original projects were never bolted on as an afterthought. They were always part of what TKG was meant to be."

"There's a lot of value to be gained from the occasional creative palate cleanser"

James Oates, Sumo Digital

Finally, James Oates, vice president of Sumo Digital, offers a more philosophical take. "Ownership can take many forms," he says. "While we've loved developing our own titles, I've also seen some of our teams at their most fulfilled working alongside external partners. The key is building a level of trust that gives teams genuine autonomy. When people are trusted to make decisions and influence the outcome, they develop real ownership and accountability regardless of whether the project is internal or external.

"I also think there's a lot of value to be gained from the occasional creative palate cleanser, particularly on longer-running projects. Game jams, secondments, and cross-project creative or technical knowledge-sharing sessions all help people step outside their normal routines. They often spark new ideas, fresh perspectives and unexpected solutions that can then be brought back into the day-to-day work.

"Ultimately, I don't think it's about whether the project belongs to you. It's about whether people feel empowered to make a meaningful contribution to its success."

No, concentrate on one thing

Stuart Muckley, CEO of the Code Wizards Group, says that his firm is a "100% purebred service provider" that doesn't create its own games. "Why? Because we believe that we need to focus on what we do best, including backend engineering, data pipelines, 24x7 NOCs [network operations centres], and helping studios manage their IT."

"We believe that we need to focus on what we do best"

Stuart Muckley, Code Wizards

That said, Code Wizards does work on internal projects to "help boost our productivity," he says. "Just never games."

But he doesn't begrudge the idea of other companies balancing making their own games alongside external work. "We completely understand that studios are four different forms: pure game studios, service providers to game studios, game studios who are doing work-for-hire/exdev temporarily, and service providers who wish to evolve into game studios," he says.

"There’s no right or wrong, but for us, we want to be easy to understand and simple to work with. Being a service provider to game studios is our mission, and central to what we do."

Joe Harford, CEO of the art provider Airship, which has worked on a huge range of games, including Forza Horizon 6 and State of Decay 3, is wary of internal projects. "Most of our work is on other people's games, and I genuinely love that. You get to touch dozens of worlds you'd never get to build on your own.

"I'd be cautious of the romance of owning IP, though. For a service studio, it can quietly become a trap. It eats resources, time, and money, it pulls your focus off the service that actually pays everyone, and taken too far, it puts you in competition with the very clients you're meant to be supporting.

"We do make our own IP, but very deliberately as a training ground, not a business. It's how we sharpen our skills and stand in our clients' shoes, so we actually understand the pressure and the decisions they're living with rather than guessing at them.

"Product and service are genuinely different business models, and running both well is harder than most people admit. We know what we're best at, and we stick to it."

"It pulls your focus off the service that actually pays everyone"

Joe Harford, Airship

Chris Wood, CEO of the Unreal engine studio Tanglewood Games, agrees with Harford that there are risks to working on your own games. "We made a conscious decision early on not to do our own projects and to instead focus solely on providing a service to an incredibly high standard," he says.

"Once a studio has its own title on the go, its time and loyalties become divided. Your best people are likely pulled onto your own project right when a client needs them, and clients pick up on that, even if it is never said out loud. We just do not have that tension. When you bring us in, you get our full attention, and there is nothing else quietly competing for it.

"I think that is a big part of why we have been successful across multiple projects for different clients. As the service is all we do, it receives our full focus, rather than being squeezed in around something of our own. It is a simple way to operate, and I think clients appreciate knowing where they stand with us."

Finally, Myke Parrott, CEO of Unreal specialists CodeDev, has had a similar experience to Tanglewood. "From day one at CodeDev we've focused entirely on external projects, typically augmenting existing development teams on their IP, rather than our own projects," he says.

However, he's leaving the door open for changes in the future. "As we grow, we're seeing increasing demand for more self-contained, full-spectrum development teams who can take on entire projects of one form or another," he says. "We'll have a very exciting solution to announce about that very soon, and part of that ambition will be to develop veteran-led new IP from scratch."