Outsourcing game art for game development?

The idea is too do all the programming, and put all of the game together using a game engine such as unity3d. The music, sounds, and all the artwork is outsourced by 3rd part people, or companies.

Knowing this is expensive design, do you think it's worth it? This assumes the game developer has gotten good at building games.

 

Its a hard question to answer, it all boils down to the chances of ROI etc. We did just this, but the difference is we use mostly asset store assets when possible. We have outsourced some stuff and also bought alot of stuff from artists at artstation directly.

 

Of course, it happens all the time. On all scales of games. There are many companies/studios that specialize in providing art on a contract basis. With games, art can be very hit and miss in terms regular time-consistent needs, it usually comes in chunks. Outsourcing solves that. In large studios, we often had our art department a central resource, meaning when work was light, they worked on other teams/projects. Even with that would have to outsource when time collided with other projects. And now, in a much smaller studio, we outsource a lot of our production art. Each of our games has 1 (amazing) artist, and they will contract out work as needed. Art can be feast or famine when it comes to hours, having a good (or a few good) outsourcers on stand by is common and very useful.

 

Usually code developers don't have equal skills in modeling or other art, and the same in reverse. So there's lots of ways to do it. Commit to having a more simple art style that is within the code dev's skill set, bring in artist(s) to the team, or outsource the artwork. If it is "worth it" is entirely situational.

 

Crowd source??

 

Remember this -
Good ain't cheap and cheap ain't good.

 

From my experience it's a great idea to lean on talent superior to your (or your team's) own. The up-front cost is minor compared to the project momentum and team morale cost incurred by fumbling around on disciplines outside of your domain knowledge. Additionally, you can and likely will learn a bunch working with other professionals!

Good luck on your project!