Sameer K. Bhatia
Octane

Outsourcing is a growing trend in the mobile gaming industry, following in the footsteps of console gaming. Apart from standard business issues, there are tough challenges and requirements specific to mobile gaming publishing. Fast turnaround, for example, is especially critical in this field. Even when a game studio works for just one operator, there remain technical reasons for outsourcing, such as the need to port games to several operating systems and across a wide variety of dynamically changing hardware platforms and screen interfaces.

In this article, we observe the trends and growth of outsourcing in gaming, for both the console and the newer mobile gaming industry, and discuss challenges that studios face in outsourcing management.