Oblivion Remastered Studio Head On Why The Unseen Side Of The Games Industry Is More Important Than Ever

It’s not uncommon to know very little about how video games are made — they are, after all, typically enormously complex years-long endeavors worked on by hundreds if not thousands of people. But one particularly overlooked aspect of the game industry is co-development, studios that specialize in doing a lot of the heavy lifting, partnering with major studios on some of the biggest games around. Among co-development studios, few are as big as Virtuos — which recently developed Oblivion Remastered alongside Bethesda.

“There’s a fairly solid consensus around the idea that smaller core teams lead to more creativity. The problem then is, how do you get a small team to produce enough content within a reasonable time frame, a couple years instead of a decade, without killing themselves crunching,” Virtuos CEO Gilles Langourieux tells Inverse, “There’s a question around scalability, and what co-development does is provide extra scalability and flexibility to the creators. By working with co-development, studios can scale faster and produce the amount of content that is required to ship the game faster.”

Established in 2004 in Shanghai, China, for two decades, Virtuos has been an essential player in co-development. Oblivion Remastered is one of the studio’s biggest projects to date, with Virtuos playing a major role in the game’s development, enabling Bethesda to still put its focus on other projects, like Starfield. But Virtuos has played a role in countless games over the years, including Cyberpunk 2077, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, The Callisto Protocol, and more. It’s also helped bring games to Nintendo Switch, like NieR: Automata and The Outer Worlds.

Over the years, the role of co-development studios has shifted, becoming a more integral piece of creation, rather than something ancillary.

“One of the classic entry points to co-development was art outsourcing. How can we get large volumes of art made cheaply offshore? That has limitations as you still have to bring the art back, integrate it, and finalize it,” Langourieux says, “So there’s been a transition to a more integrated model, where the more sophisticated provider, like Virtuos, are able to integrate in the development pipeline, and because of that they can also add design, engineering, and other capabilities.”

Virtuos has managed to grow alongside the role of co-development because of a core company philosophy, “we make games better together,” Langourieux says. He heavily stresses the idea of active collaboration with studios, and recruiting people who have a team player spirit, and who constantly look for solutions to problems. From there, the vital role of co-development is organization and communication.

“Once we’re in a relationship, we sit down every month to revisit how many people we have on a project, how many we need in the coming months, and update the plan on a regular basis,” Langourieux says, “There’s a combination of three things at Virtuos. Culture, method is second, and then the third, which is really important, is points of contact. Virtuos started in Asia, but over the last five years, we’ve added studios in Europe and North America. Because we saw how much easier it is to start co-development when you have people in the same time zone and culture.”

The elephant in the room, of course, is that there are more questions than ever about the sustainability and cost of game development, and answers will need to be found — especially in the face of more and more layoffs and cancelled projects. In Langourieux’s mind, co-development is an increasingly vital part of video game development, especially as the industry is in the midst of what he sees as a “transition” period.

“It’s important that we do not confuse a temporary transition and a recession. We are not in a recession here, the number of gamers is not going down,” says Langourieux, “We still have a lot of people very engaged in games. We need to make the transition. To offer them something new and work collectively as an industry, that it’s not the economy that’s making things difficult, or politics, it’s our ability to renew ourselves.”

Langourieux compares it to a restaurant, where if you go and only get the same flavors over and over, you might feel the need to try and find your meal somewhere else. He notes that when growth is happening, studios don’t have a need to revisit how they make games, and can just keep using the same large teams to make things again. But when growth stops, like now, reassessment has to happen.

“Co-development has a role to play in the transition by facilitating the reinvestment in innovation and creativity. If we can give players something new, if we can start taking risks again, we can get our players back, and we can get the growth back,” Langourieux says, “If every time you make your product you have to put $100 million on the line, you’re not going to be taking a lot of risks. If you can ship a great product with a lower investment, you might be taking more risks. That’s where I think we have a great role to play.”

Interestingly, Langourieux's comments are remarkably similar to what a lot of indie developers have been saying the last few years — a de-emphasis on all-encompassing projects to opt for more risk-taking and smarter, more streamlined developers. Indie developers told Inverse something similar at this year’s Game Developers Conference.

In the changing landscape, Langourieux hopes the name Virtuos can become a kind of badge of honor — in the same way people recognize Unreal as the leading blockbuster game engine, he hopes Virtuos can be seen by not only the industry, but by players, that the name is a mark of quality.

A big part of that is because he thinks co-development will only become an even bigger part of the industry.

“Once that transition is over, you will see a higher percentage of game creators employed in co-development studios like us, and a smaller proportion employed in the studios that own the intellectual property,” Langourieux says, “The majority of our teams love what they do, because they have the opportunity to work on so many different titles, and their job is secure.”