Outsourcing parts of game development is a widespread practice nowadays, and it’s particularly popular in regard to visual assets. The widespread misconception is that it’s just cheaper but in reality, partial outsourcing has more important benefits than simply saving money.
By offloading certain tasks to a character design studio, your team can focus more intently on tasks that can’t be done by an outsider as easily, for example, tasks related to R&D and decision-making.
The wide pool of available artists is the biggest advantage of outsourcing studios. You’ll significantly reduce the time and effort needed to gather a team of qualified designers for the project if you hire a character design agency.
Outsourcing character design for your games means you (or rather, the character design agency you hire) can distribute the task to multiple artists, so that it’s completed more quickly. For an in-house team, that would mean hiring more people — probably on a temporary basis — and providing them with somewhere to work, hardware, and software, which is costly and restrictive. Agencies are more flexible with this, they can move employees between projects faster.
The higher level of competition in outsourcing means that each character artist for hire in an agency is continuously upgrading their skills. Moreover, artists in studios work on different projects all the time, gaining experience faster than in-house artists working on the same game for a prolonged period of time.
All in all, outsourcing character design to a specialized service provider can shorten time-to-launch and alleviate some of your and your team’s headaches.