Following its shift to a PC-first strategy, Ustwo Games CEO Maria Sayans said the studio must dramatically reduce development budgets by relying more on contractors.
CEO Maria Sayans told Game Developer that before leaving mobile, the UK studio developed titles with budgets of £7 million to £10 million and production cycles of three to four years.
“We need to lower that,” said Sayans. “For example, if we did something like Alba or Assemble With Care, we would have to do that for a lot less money. There are people doing really, really well in those spaces on PC for much smaller budgets, that we will never be able to achieve because we’re based in London and have employees with pensions and so on.”
Ustwo currently employs about 30 people, with staffing increasing to 40 during the development of Monument Valley 3.
“We’ve been a little bit too romantic about the idea that we should have employees and give people long-term job security,” Mayans explained.
“I think that got us into a place where, reaching the heights of Monument Valley 3 [production], contractors were always a relatively low percentage of our employee base. I think that’s something we’re looking to change going forward.”
“We’ll see that we’ve got a core team and any growth will come through contractors, which is something I hate about the industry. I’ve been in the industry for 20 years, and those of us who joined in the early 2000s, we had it very good. You want to be able to give that kind of stability […] but I think that’s a shift in how we want to work with people.”
Sayans noted that expanding contract hires and co-development teams will increase flexibility and help control budgets.
She also recommended launching games at higher prices and offering discounts later to support the studio’s sustainability.
“This is not going to be a very popular thing with players, but the truth is you have a cohort of people—your day one players—who are most likely to be your core fans for whom the difference between £5 and £10 [is going to be negligible].”
