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Insomniac Games: Are we ready for another Hulk game?

By Andre Farquharson

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LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – JUNE 10: (L-R) Crystal Dynamics’ Creative Director Shaun Escayg and Marvel Games’ Vice President & Creative Director Bill Rosemann unveil Marvel’s Avengers game content during Square Enix Live E3 2019 in downtown Los Angeles on Monday, June 10, 2019. (Photo by Joe Scarnici/Getty Images For Square Enix)
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – JUNE 10: (L-R) Crystal Dynamics’ Creative Director Shaun Escayg and Marvel Games’ Vice President & Creative Director Bill Rosemann unveil Marvel’s Avengers game content during Square Enix Live E3 2019 in downtown Los Angeles on Monday, June 10, 2019. (Photo by Joe Scarnici/Getty Images For Square Enix) /

2. Another house of talent should team up

The house of talent, aside from Activision being one of the largest third-party developers in the gaming industry is Santa Monica Studios, having been acquired by Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE). The studio based out of California is well-known for working on God of War games and Kinetica. Plus, they  also contributed to Spider-Man PS4.

While the practice of co-production is becoming more common place in the video game industry, it would be more crucial in this case where two minds meet in the same place to solve a problem and provide a solution, especially a AAA console game of this scale. There are a few types of co-production models when it comes to game development. This will not be designated in any desired order; there is an independent game development, which is among a small team of video game developers or a studio that work with a game publisher.

Another is outsourcing, which is the more popular choice that is taken by game publishers and game developers today. This sort of practice, which is more specific to software development, is to have an external company, usually from outside the West, to assist with gaming assets. This is a practice from Ukrainian IT companies used in such a way to reduce costs by transferring work to other parties. The final one is in in-house game development, which is fairly straightforward, more often than not practiced by third-party developers.

In this scenario, the kind of co-production will be a combination of in-house and outsourcing. So therefore, we have Activision as the publisher, and we will use of the many studios it has acquired to develop the game. Our chosen in-house studio will be Beenox, a subsidiary founded in Quebec City, Canada in 2000, which had been acquired by Activision in 2005.

They are responsible for Skylanders series and some of the more recent Spider-Man games. The place I would go for outsourcing in-game development would be Malaysia-based art outsourcing and video game development company, Streamline Studios.

Founded in 2001 in the Netherlands, Streamline have sister teams and a large community base where they focus on “making creative’s and innovators succeed,” as mentioned on their website. Some of the games they have worked on were Street Fighter V, Gears of War, Killer Instinct, Final Fantasy XV and Bioshock Infinite. While outsourcing, at times, is frowned upon due to its cons being a crunch-time, low-level contractor system, its CEO Alexander Fernandez, who responded to a feature on Polygon, insisted this was not the case.

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