Specialist Production Houses

Developing contemporary video game soundtracks is expensive and very specialist work. As game concepts and budgets have grown, many developers have concluded that they don’t have the full range of skills that they need to do this work in-house, and nor would it be cost effective to develop and maintain them.

Instead, a range of specialist service studios have grown up around the industry. In this video, we explore the range of production and implementation services that specialist studios offer game developers and speak to Raymond Usher, who runs Euphonious, a game audio service company who has worked on a number of big titles.

Online gaming hubs and distribution portals provide a direct route to market for indie developers, and middleware tools and assets have made the process of game development much more accessible.

This could be seen as being a very positive thing, since it brings new perspectives to game development and opens up new opportunities for innovation, as we saw with Dear Esther, and just as happened in the early days of computer gaming, but it could be seen as a negative, possibly flooding the marketplace with mediocre game clones produced by enthusiastic amateurs, just as happened before the first big video game crash.

What is your take on this? How might we all encourage the former and discourage the latter? Please post your thoughts to the comments section below.