5 REASONS TO OUTSOURCE GAME AUDIO ASSETS IN YOUR VIDEO GAME DEVELOPMENT
Game audio external development is the best option for mid and small size game studios, if what you want is to have time to focus on core functions of the project.
Outsourcing, or sometimes called external development, is a support service which will help you in specific parts of your game development. Not only game audio assets, but there are a few areas that could be outsourced in a development project like: Concept art, 2D, 3D, animation, VFX, and many more!. As Flutu specializes in game audio solutions, we will focus on this matter for education purposes.
Here are 5 reasons you should outsource game audio assets:
- Reducing cost
Having an inhouse game audio professional requires not only the salary cost, but also library subscription, hardware for music composition and special skills that may turn the inhouse professional hour/rate quite expensive.
Another problem studios face is when their music/sound collaborator decides to move to a bigger company leaving your current project behind. When this happens the studio slows down productivity while finding and training another professional that would fit perfectly as the previous one. Not everyone has an HR department for interviewing and pre-selecting the candidates. As you may know, most of the time the game producer, CEO or even the programmer has to deal with this time consuming situation.
Having a game audio external development team mitigates all those risks, while you will be working with top quality professionals with updated libraries, hardware and expertise. So by outsourcing your game audio projects you reduce time on training and onboarding.
Flutu Game Audio is a Brazilian company and therefore having excellent professionals in the local market, the overall cost for production in Brazil is way cheaper than Munich, Oslo, London, LA for example. For that reason we can offer the same service with a more competitive price that benefits most of our clients and engage our team, as we brazilians are very open minded people for developing international projects.
Talking about numbers, take a look at the following graph for our salary comparison analysis.
* 2021 Soundcon Survey – Game Audio Industry Survey
In 2021 Soundcon released an interesting graph that shows us that the avg. salary in the US among game audio professionals runs between 30k to 90k USD$ (year) and the majority earning 70k US$ annually. It is important to state that a salaried employee receives a regular paycheck, and is typically eligible for benefits such as paid sick days, vacation, health insurance, retirement plan, etc.
While in Brazil, according to several job panels such as SEBRAE, Guia de Carreira and Vagas.br a Music Producer/Sound designer usually earns from 10k to 30k US$ yearly.
Having access to highly skilled professionals for a reasonable cheaper price is one of the biggest advantages for hiring a game audio outsourcing team.
- Access to the global hiring pool
While outsourcing your game audio assets to Flutu Music you instantly get access to talents. We as specialists curate the quality of our associated producers to make sure they are updated to tech and procedures. Also, we established delivery standards that protect our clients for extra revisions and check upon the project schedules, and the best: if anything EVER happens, it won’t be your responsibility to solve the problem, or look for solution, this would be all solved by Flutu while you take care of other parts of the game.
Be mindful that when you hire a full team like Flutu Game Audio, you benefit from
- Fluent english/spanish/german Communication
- 24/7 contact with the game audio studio
- Contracts are clear and transparent
- Ability to down/up scale the team
- Punctual and committed team
- AVOID CRUNCH
As game projects work with very tight deadlines, working extra hours is quite common and it can generate in-house team burnouts and can risk their motivation and inspiration. Video games are art, so rush and stress are not the best friends of artistic processes!
If you have an in house game audio pro, think about outsourcing unexpected tasks such as casting, dialogue editing, VO processing and localisation – these are tasks that simply load your producer with work and reduce productivity inside the studio.
As for a studio that runs by themselves on the Game Audio field, the game dev usually starts their quest in websites such as Envato or any other sample library available – I don’t recommend taking that path as in the beginning can sound fun to choose upon 500+ different click sounds but after 5 hours spent on this single task will definitely make you reconsider an external development team.
Simple as that, you don’t need to work after hours to solve your Game Audio problems, there’s a quick and cheap solution for you, and it’s called external development!
- An expert one click away
Need SFX designers? Composers? Vocal direction? Implementation? What if with all of that we also merge into your in-house studio culture? Yeah, we are on different discord servers daily waiting for our clients to ask their new request.
Another important aspect of outsourcing is that due to the amount of diverse projects we have worked on, we came in to add all the expertise into your game giving you a fresh perspective about your project supporting you with other games experiences. In the end, this means more market perspective, and a successful professional video game
- Game Audio Quality Control
We are experts in helping and assisting development processes in the different stages for specific tasks and commitment is our number one selling point. And because of our experience on that, you can expect the best from us since everything were previously tested
Outsourcing your game audio assets ascertain you with the most qualified audio assets one can provide you. Since our clients can find different service providers, we are here to make sure they are satisfied with the quality of our deliveries.
- There is more to do
Developing game audio assets can be very monotonous and even tedious, if you don’t have the proper tools or skills for it. I don’t recommend wasting your creativity team in these jobs. You should use your talented crew and their skills for paying attention to detail, and making relevant decisions, to ensure that the big picture of the project is flowing
- Final thoughts
Thanks for reading! Now that you understand just how much of a difference it makes to have someone to take care of your audio assets, tell us more about future projects, what are your dreams?
I am very happy to write this article for you. My returning customers know how it feels to get back home. Now, if you are a newbie here, you are very welcome cause Flutu Game Audio was created to serve you, just the way you deserve!
Tell us more about your project visiting the “Tell us More!” section of the website, we are anxious to know you and your projects!
See ya!
