This article is part of ExDev Week.
Canadian studio Blackbird Interactive, which was founded by Relic Entertainment and EA Canada alumni back in 2007, is probably best known for creating Hardspace: Shipbreaker. But the studio has always had its hand in the external development jar as well.
“We do basically everything,” explains president and chief creative officer Rory McGuire. “We do full work-for-hire projects, we do co-development, and we also do our own original games.”
McGuire gives Minecraft Legends and Homeworld 3 as examples of Blackbird’s full work-for-hire contracts, and the studio has also worked on titles like Escape the Backrooms and the Starfield DLC Terran Armada. But not everything Blackbird has worked on is public, such is the often secretive nature of co-development contracts. “We worked briefly with the Respawn team on Apex Legends,” notes McGuire. “We haven’t talked too much about it, but that was about a year we worked with them.”
From the very beginning, Blackbird’s business model has involved taking on work-for-hire and then investing the profits back into the studio’s own original games. McGuire likens the studio to Gearbox Software, which started out by making expansions and ports for other people’s games, such as the PC version of Halo: Combat Evolved.
“They gave us a lot of advice on how to structure the business,” he says. “They referred us to other studios that had been using this model too, and it’s actually quite ubiquitous. Blizzard got started this way.” Indeed, back when it was still known as Silicon & Synapse, Blizzard did a number of ports, including bringing J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Vol. I to the Amiga.
But when so much of the company’s day-to-day activities involve working on other people’s games and taking direction from elsewhere, how does Blackbird keep its creatively talented team happy? And how does it balance work-for-hire with developing its own original titles?
Creative excitement
“It’s definitely complicated,” says McGuire. “I think you have to invest more time into it than you would think. A big part of it is making sure that the people are excited about working on the thing.
“So, for example, we did the PS5 port of Minecraft. There are some people that would say, ‘Oh, that’s a 10-year-old game and there’s no creative challenge there, I don’t want to do that’. And then there’s another person that’ll say, ‘Oh, if I work on that, my kids will think I’m Gandalf, and that’s the best thing I could ever work on’. So I think you have to invest the time into talking with individual people and see who’s excited about it.
“I think that simple litmus test of ‘are people excited to work on this’ is also a great way of determining whether or not you should take on the project. If it’s a project that nobody wants to do and you can’t find a silver lining, maybe it doesn’t have as much value to the company.”
Alex Delamaire, Blackbird’s director of business and development strategy, adds that exdev work can offer a welcome change of pace compared with working on original projects. “Going into uncharted waters can be very exciting, but it can be a bit stressful as well,” he says. “And it’s nice to sometimes mix it up with projects where you’re working on really cool, established brands.”
McGuire points to Blackbird’s recent remasters of Warcraft 1 and 2. “For the people on that team, being able to go in and look at the code from 27 or 29 years ago is really cool… but also they learn a lot from it.”
Variety is the great allure of external development. “There’s a lot of different opportunities for people to try their hands at different things and learn different things,” says McGuire. “We’re not just an RTS studio anymore.”
But that variety can also cause headaches. “I think for us the challenge has been balancing projects where obviously we have credentials and we can be legitimate, even if they’re in a slightly different genre, and then finding projects that are actually genuinely exciting to our teams,” says Delamaire. “Sometimes we’ll see if we can try to get something that’s a little bit out of our league, but that is creatively interesting.”
He gives Escape The Backrooms as an example. “We’re not necessarily a horror game developer, but we have people at Blackbird who in the past have worked on games that may actually be in that genre.” The past experience of Blackbird’s employees can help to convince clients the firm can take on a project, even if the studio doesn’t have anything similar in its back catalogue, he says.
Humble pie
But working for an external client also requires a certain amount of humbleness. “I think at the end of the day, you’re in a service position,” says McGuire. “You have to make them happy with the work that you’ve done.” Maintaining that relationship with a client is crucial, he says – making them feel like the notes they have given on a project are being properly acted on.
“When you’re in a service position and someone else is paying for everything, anything they ask for has a lot more weight to it than if, say, our internal creative director was asking for something,” he continues. “Like, the internal creative director isn’t necessarily going to scrap the project and pull funding if they don’t get what they want, but every publisher request, either near term or distantly, has that repercussion behind it.”
But it’s not as simple as just doing everything the client asks. “You have to manage the partner,” says McGuire. “If a partner is asking for too much stuff, you have to make them aware of the fact that, hey, we need to sit down and prioritise this, we need to understand what you actually need. And that conversation, it’s never easy, but it’s also always respected and appreciated.”
There’s no one size fits all, either. “Every partner’s different,” says McGuire. “Some want to be very hands-on, some want you to be self-directed.”
“We’ve worked with partners that had 40 different people giving us feedback on stuff, so you’re always going to get disparate feedback – and the least important feedback might come from the loudest voice.”
“You may have an opinion on it, but in the end, it’s their product”
Delamaire adds that it’s important to be aware of the internal dynamics within the client organisation and the constraints they’re under. “Coming from the outside, some things might seem very obvious to you, and you may be like, ‘Oh, we should do this, or we should maybe tweak things that way’. But there’s often reasons why they haven’t done it yet, or it’s been a little difficult.”
“There’s definitely been times where… if we had been in charge, let’s say, of the commercial strategy and marketing, you would have done it differently, but that was not our place,” he continues. “You may have an opinion on it, but in the end, it’s their product, it’s their strategy.”
Going all in
Given the example of Gearbox given earlier, we’re intrigued as to whether Blackbird sees itself as eventually becoming entirely focused on original titles in the future, and ditching the external development contracts.
Delamaire says a better example might be Behaviour Interactive, which has an internally developed powerhouse in the form of Dead By Daylight, but which still maintains a strong focus on external development. “I think we see ourselves probably a bit more like that,” he says, “because it’s kind of how we’ve always operated from the start.”
The great thing about external development, he says, is that it encourages you to go outside your comfort zone and stretch your skills.
McGuire agrees. “I think there is value in it, and I think that there is learning in it,” he says, adding that any internally developed game Blackbird puts out would have to be a “pretty dramatic success” for the company to consider giving up exdev and pulling everyone onto that one property.
Given the current climate in the games industry, it also makes sense to spread the financial risk and avoid putting all your eggs in one basket. McGuire says the company tries to maintain a diverse range of partners for that very reason. “It’s pretty rare that you’re going to have corporate restructures or cancellations across multiple partners at the same time. I mean, it did happen in 2023, but since then it hasn’t happened as much.”
When cancellations do happen, McGuire says Blackbird can usually find homes for the developers on another project within a couple of months. But making sure those contracts keep coming in isn’t exactly easy. “It does mean a lot of hustling and a lot of work for myself and Alex, because essentially we need to have a constant influx of work,” says McGuire.
In addition, the wider changes in the industry have affected the kind of work that comes in. “Large-scale work-for-hire projects that are like $15-20 million are still out there, but they’re a lot less frequent than they used to be.”
Instead, Blackbird is seeing a lot more 6-18 month projects, as opposed to 18-36 month projects – which means a lot more time spent on business development.
Movie-style production
A lot of people have been talking about the games industry shifting to a more movie-style production process, where companies retain a small core of creatives and then hire external developers to work on the project once it’s ready to go into full production.
“We’re definitely seeing a lot of partners that are taking that approach,” says McGuire. “We’re definitely seeing it more often than what was previously the case. I don’t know if that’s where the industry is going to end up; I think it will be a way that people make games.”
He still sees just as many games being made in the more traditional fashion, with an internal team – but he points out that the high cost of development in some regions, like the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, will make the movie-style production approach more attractive. “If you’re in that market, I think it’s a little bit different,” he says. “In that market, I think we will see this a lot more.”
We’re also seeing the rise of external development studios in Asia and other emerging markets, where costs are much lower than in North America – which could potentially draw away some of the contracts that would normally go to Blackbird and other studios. “It’s definitely a factor,” acknowledges McGuire, “and it’s something that is going to drive down the average cost. Our headcount price can only go so low, whereas that’s not the case in some of these emerging markets. I mean, China’s one, but Brazil has also had a huge scene emerge, and they have the advantage of being on a similar time zone to North America, too, so they’re even arguably more competitive.”
That kind of thing can influence decision-making, he says, noting Blackbird won a recent contract on the basis that the company was in the same time zone as the client. But that and price aren’t the only factors to consider, he emphasises.
“Our headcount price can only go so low, whereas that’s not the case in some of these emerging markets”
“If you’re producing shoes for a sports game or you’re producing boxes and crates for a shooter, sure, I think anyone in any market can do that,” he says. “But part of the appeal that we have is that we have worked on our own games. So if you’re working on, say, a sci-fi game with a certain feel and vibe, we’re a pretty good fit to work on that, and we live and breathe that stuff. You might not get that from a developer in an emerging market in the same way, but you will get a better price.”
He points out that there are work-for-hire and co-dev partners in North America that are “two or three times the price of China” that are still getting work. “And that is because they offer something, a special service, that emerging markets don’t.”
And Blackbird offers something US companies don’t, thanks to its location in Vancouver. Delamaire points to a 2025 CBRE Research report on the one-year costs of rent and wages for a company of 500 people in both the United States and Canada. All of the major Canadian cities are far cheaper to do business in: the costs for Vancouver come out at $41.7 million, whereas the San Francisco Bay Area is more than double, at $86.7 million.
“Ontario and Vancouver are competing at a level that is dramatically lower than what you would pay in some of the capital markets, like Seattle, San Francisco, and LA,” says McGuire. “That’s definitely an advantage for us.”
