The Role of Co-Development in Modern Game Development
About this episode
The episode explores the role of co-development in modern game development, discussing its benefits and misconceptions.
It can feel like modern game development competes to ship the best game with the smallest possible team. We constantly hear stories about breakout titles built by a handful of developers, but that narrative is often incomplete. Behind many “tiny teams” sits a much larger layer of co-development, outsourcing, and external support across engineering, art, QA, localization, and more. In this episode, host Alexandra Takei , VP at Medal , sits down with Ninel Anderson , founder and CEO of Devoted Studios , to go under the hood of that hidden layer of game development. The two unpack what co-development actually is, where the line sits between co-dev and outsourcing, and why a risk-averse market has pushed more studios toward fractional resourcing and flexible external partnerships. They also discuss a core misconception in the market: that external partners are mainly about finding cheaper labor, when in reality the real advantage often comes from better pipelines, stronger process design, and access to the right talent globally. Finally, the episode explores how Devoted thinks about staffing and capacity, and why communication training is core to the company’s culture. We’d also like…
People in this episode
Host: Alexandra Takei
Guest: Ninel Anderson
Topics covered
- co-development
- game development
- outsourcing
- fractional resourcing
- communication training
- game studios
Keywords
- co-development
- game development
- outsourcing
- fractional resourcing
- communication training
- game studios
- external partnerships
Sponsors
Overwolf
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Devoted Studios, Medal
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