That's why I think that everything that's not strictly 'game design' should be contracted out. You really don't need to keep a bunch of artists and composers around when you can pay less for contracted work, with less money going to employment benefits etc. Nowadays with the internet, you can even hire an artist from across the globe, you can take your pick at the best artist for the job, and pay less. How's that not a good thing. And while yes, there are diminishing returns, right now on AI issues, there seems to be SteelVolt alone working on them, so I'd say right now we are very far from that threshold.
Watch out for getting sucked into the myth that contracting out means everything the same for cheaper. One of the benefits for having a team co-located and working together means that content people, programmers, designers and QA can all work together on issues together, and build trust, understanding and continuity as a team. It's rarely the case (even with art - which has to fit with a UI, for example) that there's a clean line where one job finishes and another ends. The only people that I know outside of these forums (ie, this isn't a dig at you
) that are really gung-ho about widespread contracting out are clueless executives who use it to get short-term returns for long-term hits to their business. If we want HoI4 to be a long-term quality production, I'd be strongly, strongly against that kind of contracting out. The largest problem is that it's much harder to maintain continuity of staff (after all, a contractor is only available when not on another contract - and if they're being dropped in and out of contract all the time, they're hardly going to be sitting around waiting for the next piece of Paradox work) - and instead of the gains of cheaper labour, you waste a whole lot of money bringing new people up to speed all the time, effectively speed-limiting the level of quality and competency of staff working on the project.
It's one of those 'false economies'. It looks good on the surface, and for the first few months might even get a similar job done cheaper, but it erodes quality and capability over time, and can often lead to costing more to achieve the same longer-term. I can't stress enough, particularly for the kind of complex, interconnected work that is game development, why it's a good idea to have a core 'team' working together, rather than a couple of game designers supported by a bunch of contract managers and randoms (qualified sure, but there's a whole lot more to any job worth doing than basic skills) picked off the internet based on whose available when the work needs to be done. Sorry to go on a bit, this is one of my bugbears, as I've seen it so often over the years pushed by managers who then go and destroy the capabilities of an organisation, often because they're so inexperienced themselves they don't understand the damage they're doing or have done. Obviously, I'd be keen not to see it happen to one of my favourite developers
.
That's not to say contracting at the margins on a bit of art can't help (it does - and, in fact, I'm pretty confident Paradox does contract out some of their art), but Paradox's music, for example, is a product of having a really good composer on staff for years that has a lot of experience scoring music that works in a GSG context. It would be possible, of course, to get any old composer to score any old stuff, but it's highly unlikely to work as well (I don't know a single other strategy developer who has music that as consistently hits the high mark that Paradox's does).
