Founded in 2004, Virtuos has grown into a big company when it comes to the production of games. As an external developer, Virtuos‘ team has crossed 4,200 professional game devs who can supplement the teams at game studios and publishers as they finish their games.
The Singapore-based company can finish smaller games with a big shot of staffing at the end or engage in long-term co-development with game publishers as they start the games. Virtuos has a big presence in Asia, and it has worked with nearly all of the top 25 entertainment companies in the world, with either work on video or game content.
I’ve caught up with Virtuos CEO Gilles Langourieux multiple times in recent years — including last February 2024 and in October 2024 — to get access to his bird’s-eye view on the global picture of making games.
I saw him briefly at the Dice Summit in Las Vegas and caught up with him in an online conversation this week. Once again, we talked about everything from the state of the game jobs market to the use of AI in making games.
His company started in China in 2004 with a studio in Shanghai. It expanded to other cities like Chengdu and Xian. Then it acquired Sparx in 2011 and moved out of China to relocate its headquarters to Singapore in 2018. Langourieux’s company has worked on well over 1,000 projects for the top digital entertainment companies across the world.
Recently, the company worked on DLC for Cyberpunk 2077, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, and more. He’s excited to see games coming like Marvel 1943, Judas, Gears of War, Mafia, Doom and more. In our conversation, we touched on how tight budgets could lead to more creativity, the contraction of gaming, the need to be global, the shift to the big game engines like Unreal vs proprietary engines, the need to rejuvenate older IPs,
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: How was DICE Summit? I saw you there briefly.
Gilles Langourieux: I enjoyed it, but I spent too much time in meetings. It’s strange. Usually I spend more time at DICE on the floor and listening. For some reason I had too many meetings this time. Maybe because there’s so much reorganization going on.
GamesBeat: It’s the same for me. I had to schedule lots of back to back meetings. I ran out of time to just go find people and say hello.
Langourieux: But thanks to you–for example, I read through the transcript of the conversation between Neil Druckmann and his counterpart Cory Barlog at Santa Monica, about creativity. That’s one I would have liked to attend in person.
GamesBeat: It was interesting, the mature way they had of looking at the clash between business and creativity. You can create forever and iterate over and over again, but finally, when someone gives you a schedule, that’s when you have to deliver.
Langourieux: If you apply that to what’s going on at the more global business level, the same is probably true. With more budget constraints, we might end up with renewed creativity. Just like the deadlines are forcing Neil’s team to come up with the best that they have, tighter budgets might also arrive at a similar result.
We’ve made this big move to invest in three development studios in the west. We felt this was necessary on two fronts. First, to demonstrate clearly to the industry that we are game developers. We have full game development capabilities. Second, to make it easier for our teams to engage with clients during pre-production. If you want to do co-dev right, you need to start early. To start early, you need to build trust during pre-production. It’s easier to build trust during pre-production if you have teams in the same culture and the same time zone.
What Pipeworks on the west coast, Umanaïa in Montreal, and Abstraction in central Europe bring to us is that proximity in time zones and culture. They’ve been doing co-development for many years. They’re good at embedding themselves with clients early. We bring the ability to scale. They’ve maybe had more limitations there.
More than ever, we believe in our model of bringing flexibility to game development studios. We think studios face, with budget constraints–they have to rely on leaner, more agile internal teams. Our part of the industry is to bring that flexibility to them by making it easy. In the past, in our history, we started in China. Our teams were far away, offshore teams, different cultures, different time zones. We’ve been successful with that model, but it was time for us to get closer to our clients, so we can start work earlier and deeper. Then we can get everyone working together when there’s a need to scale up.
GamesBeat: There’s an interesting contrast happening. I wouldn’t ask you to comment on them specifically, but Netease seems to be going the opposite direction. They’ve looked at the quality of the triple-A content like Black Myth: Wukong and decided that the teams in China are ready to do a lot of triple-A games. They want to double down on those. The consequence for them is that they just finished investing a lot of money into western studios that they now look at as too expensive. They may not need those people anymore. They might retreat from all of that.
Langourieux: They’re a publisher. We’re a development studio specializing in co-development. How we need to be set up is quite different. It’s very important for us to have global teams working with clients in every region. We have business relationships in North America, Europe, and Asia. The easier it is for them to work with us, the better our business. By definition, we have to be global. This has nothing to do with the strategy of this publisher or that publisher. We have to be global.
The point we can agree on is that yes, there is great development talent in every region, including China. Black Myth: Wukong has demonstrated that in a stellar way. We’re trying to have studios in every talent pool that matters and take the best of that talent pool and make them work together. What’s unique about the Virtuos setup is that all our studios are good at working together. Depending on the needs of this game or that client, we can find the right talent in the right place and make them work together to create a solution. We call that the “glocalized” approach. It’s global and local at the same time. I don’t think many publishers have that same approach, or need that same approach.
GamesBeat: How many studios do you still need to invest in? Is that clear to you yet?
Langourieux: Our strategy is not a roll-up strategy. We’re not trying to acquire many studios. What’s important for us is to have one studio in every geography where great games are made. We’re still missing a couple of geographies. We’re trying to complete the puzzle so that we cover all the important geographies where games are made. We cover all the important talent pools and we cover all the important platforms. But once we have a studio like Pipeworks, we don’t plan to add two or three competitors to Pipeworks in the same area. We just plan to help them grow as much as they’re able and willing to grow.
Black Shamrock was a studio we acquired in Ireland in 2017. There were 15 people at the time. Today it’s 200 people and one of the biggest in Ireland. We have a track of growing the studios we acquire, not stockpiling more and more studios that end up competing with each other.
GamesBeat: How many people do you have altogether now? Still in the 4,000 range or so?
Langourieux: We broke 4,000 with these three acquisitions. We’re now at 4,200 across 25 different offices. I want to insist again, these are all studios working on the same platform, so they can all work together and form solutions together to serve the production needs of our clients.
GamesBeat: How does some of the outlook break down for you in 2025 and beyond?
Langourieux: There’s good and bad. On the plus side, we’re very happy to start the year with the release of DLC 2.2 for Cyberpunk, which illustrates how we can help a client expand their IP while continuing to develop other games. They can satisfy an existing audience while continuing to develop other games by relying on some of our creative teams. We were very excited to see Metal Gear Solid get a release date. That’s going to be a great showcase of our high-end Unreal 5 co-development capabilities. We’re excited to see the Switch 2 get announced. We had a great run on the first Switch with more than 10 titles developed for the platform. We think the next one is going to be very interesting.
That’s all the positive. At the same time, the environment is still a bumpy one. We see cancellations. We see the overinvestment bubble of 2021 and 2022 continuing to deflate. We have to keep all our teams on their toes and use our global organization to mitigate these kinds of issues. We continue to see cancellations.
GamesBeat: There are still some unhealthy companies among the big ones, or companies that are not quite finished with their unraveling process.
Langourieux: On that note, I like to compare it to 2008, when we saw the disappearance of Midway and THQ almost in the same year. That left some unpaid invoices for quite a few developers. I’m not seeing that right now. I’m not saying that won’t happen, but it doesn’t look like any of the major publishers, at least, are going out of business. There’s some reorganization happening for sure.
GamesBeat: How are you spread across not just geographies, but capabilities as well? Things like Unreal versus Unity shops and other kinds of specialization across the organization.
Langourieux: Five years ago, more than 60% of the work that we were doing was done in proprietary engines. Today I think it’s the other way around. More than 60% of the work we do is done in middleware engines like Unreal and Unity. We do more work on bigger games, and bigger games tend to be made more with Unreal. When you hear Epic claim more than 50% market share, it’s consistent with what we’re seeing on our end.
There is a positive element to that. Skill sets transfer more easily than before from one project to another. For example, when we have a large cancellation happening, it’s easier for us to reorganize and have teams work on other projects. Their Unreal skills are useful on other Unreal projects. In the past, when we had a big cancellation on a proprietary engine, if the same client on the same engine didn’t have more work for us, there was a delay in terms of retraining the team to do co-development work in a different pipeline.
GamesBeat: I asked Tim Sweeney about this once. One consequence of having a lot of shifts toward Unreal might be that a lot of games start looking the same. He said that might have been true around the Unreal 2 or 3 stage, but now there’s much more customization possible within the engine.
Langourieux: I completely agree. In fact, we started something we call the Virtuos Labs, which are small studios purely focused on engineering. One of the larger labs we have now is Abstraction Games. They have 100 people, an engineering studio. Some of the work they do is exactly that. They customize pipelines based on Unreal to make certain kinds of games that have their own specific flavor, their own specific gameplay because of that customization effort. We do see that happening.
GamesBeat: Do you see a clear calculation on–if a company changes to a more standard game engine instead of a proprietary one, does that save a certain amount of production costs?
Langourieux: What I’ve seen and heard the most is around the ease of finding and training talent. If you have a standard pipeline, it becomes easier to recruit and faster to onboard talent compared to proprietary engines, which create a barrier to inception of talent, and also, in a way, a barrier to inception of co-development partners. One size doesn’t fit all. We’ll continue to need proprietary engines and work with them, because in many instances they allow the creators to get more out of the hardware, to optimize for certain types of gameplay and certain types of rendering. But having one standard makes it easier at the HR level.
GamesBeat: Are the macroeconomic factors looking any different today than six months ago? We still have inflation in the United States. We’re not seeing a big growth wave. We still seem to have a slow-growing economy.
Langourieux: If I look continent by continent, China and southeast Asia seem to be the most dynamic right now, followed by Korea. Japan is a mixed bag. You have two kinds of actors there. Some are still restructuring. Others are very bullish about making products for the global market to compensate for the slower local market. Europe and North America are both still working through a new approach to game development with safer bets on products made by smaller teams.
I read the articles worrying about employment in the west. Once the model has been rebalanced, there’s no reason for employment not to take off again. It may be in a different way, with more reliance on freelancing and external development than before. Leaner internal studios as well. But there’s no reason for growth not to pick up again. There’s an appetite, for example, that we see across the board for rejuvenating IPs. IPs that were left on the sideline because we were only funding huge bets on big games as a service. Now there’s a renewed appetite for looking back on older IPs that could make for smaller, more creative titles.
GamesBeat: I’m starting to see more formation of new publishers. That’s different from the trend I saw around many of them closing in the last couple of years. Our job market counter, Amir Satvat, thinks we had an interesting crossover month in January, where there was finally more hiring than firing in the month. On a six-week trailing basis, this is the first time he thinks that’s happened in 30 months or so. Do you see any matching data on your side suggesting that the layoff wave might be balancing out with more hiring?
Langourieux: I don’t have data that’s as good as his, but what I see on our end is that we’re able to continue growing our headcount. We’re tapping into different global markets, which are operating at slightly different rhythms. When one market is facing a cancellation, we look to another market to compensate.
GamesBeat: What else do you notice about the structure of the external development industry? I’m curious about what it’s like to operate in a market where there’s one company that’s much bigger than you, at least in terms of how many staff they have.
Langourieux: It’s exciting. We have teams that have the opportunity to work on fantastic brands. Just think about a few upcoming titles. Marvel 1943, Judas, Gears of War, Mafia, DOOM. There’s so much going on. When you’re operating in a company at our scale, you can focus on the positives and make sure you associate your teams with the most likely winners of tomorrow.
There are still a lot of winners. You go to DICE and you meet people. Not everyone is unhappy about cancellations and layoffs. You have a smaller number of companies that are delivering successful titles. They’re happy and positive about the future. We try to focus on helping these companies. Our people get to work on these kinds of promising games. We also try to dodge the bullets. I think that’s a fair way of describing what it’s like to operate at our size.
GamesBeat: What is your process for finding those partners and projects like? You get out to a lot of events.
Langourieux: I do. It’s an interesting part of my job. We have, I guess, two parallel ways. Our studios have existing relationships with other studios that they maintain. Some of the relationships we have are as old as the company. Some of the initial clients we started working with when we formed the company are still clients today. Our studio leadership maintains these relationships around IPs or brands that we’re familiar with. One example is the Final Fantasy brand. We’ve been working on that nonstop for more than 15 years.
Then we have a global team around business development. They speak to studios during events to demonstrate the beauty of co-development done well. There’s a true beauty and comfort when you have co-development partnerships established early on in your production cycles, that are giving you more options and more flexibility as you progress through the development of a game. Our teams are there to demonstrate how we help clients design, develop, and deliver. That third D, delivering, is often the critical piece. Being able to deliver something at quality and on time. That’s the Virtuos way.
We have evangelists around what good co-dev looks like. They’re able to explain how important it is to start early, how important it is to have the ability to scale gradually, how important it is to put in place the same systems on both sides that give transparency. Early, scalability, transparency. They show what good looks like for co-dev. That’s how we’re gradually adding more and more clients to our business, through these evangelists.
I don’t know if you’ve met Lindsay Gupton, the head of Pipeworks. He’s been doing this for 26 years now. They’re so good at it. I’m lucky to have such a master of co-development join the group and help us show our American clients how it can be done even better today with the addition of Pipeworks.
GamesBeat: Are you running into working with multiple co-development companies at the same time?
Langourieux: I don’t recommend to our clients that they put all their eggs in one basket. It’s perfectly doable to have multiple co-development studios side by side. I do advocate that they change from the old model of having dozens of siloed smaller studios. It’s difficult to coordinate them, to keep them aligned on the same vision. Very often you have to do the integration and polish yourself in that older model. We recommend going toward a simplified model, where you rely on a smaller number of bigger co-development partners who will handle the coordination, who will handle the integration for you.
The model where you’re working with many different smaller external vendors doesn’t scale very well. It leads to a lot of closing issues toward the end of production.
GamesBeat: Unity had their problems around price increases. They brought in a new CEO. It seems like they’re in a more stable situation. Things are a bit more predictable. They’re not at war with their customers anymore. I imagine that’s a good thing for companies like yours.
Langourieux: All I can say is that even though there was a lot of noise around this, we haven’t noticed a complete change in who is using what engine. It’s difficult to change a pipeline. There may have been a couple of instances where these changes were made, but the state of who is using what hasn’t completely changed as far as we can see. I think it’s good for the industry if they have an organization and pricing structure that makes their clients happier. It’s good that they managed to correct course.
GamesBeat: I was going into an interview recently with AWS about cloud game development. What do you think about the state of that right now?
Langourieux: It’s very important. Initial efforts are on the way from many different parties. You mentioned Amazon. You can see what Microsoft is doing with their own cloud solution. The players in China are also very active. Alibaba, Tencent, they have a number of cloud initiatives. It was also interesting to hear how Asia is the fastest-growing market for Xbox, because of players experiencing Xbox through the cloud. The devices they use in lower-income countries are less powerful, but that’s compensated for by the fact that they access games through the cloud. That should continue.
We’re happy to see these new technologies. We’re looking forward to seeing this new infrastructure combining with AI to lead to new types of games. At GDC we plan to showcase, with Inworld, new types of games that can be created thanks to AI. I expect we’ll be only one of many similar initiatives. It’s required. We aren’t going to grow the industry by simply rejuvenating old IPs or making smaller games. We also need to bring completely new types of gameplay.
GamesBeat: Have you seen AI tools arriving yet that are living up to some of the hype?
Langourieux: I wouldn’t point to a single tool. I think we should point at a combination of tools that when assembled together, one after the other, allow you to transform a traditional workflow into something that moves twice as fast. The first wave of AI use seems to be more structured this way, rather than a killer app. I haven’t seen fantastic games made through a single prompt yet. Maybe others have. But I have seen entire workflows accelerated. I’ve seen new types of gameplay becoming possible because of the endless possibilities that AI now offers.
GamesBeat: We still maybe have a lot of impact ahead of us.
Langourieux: I’m convinced of that, absolutely.
GamesBeat: Do you expect new consoles on a certain timetable after Nintendo? Are there any particular indications?
Langourieux: No, I have no indications. What I’m most excited about is to see how we’re going to tap into the next bucket of potential gamers, people who can’t buy an expensive platform, but are playing through either a lower-end mobile device or lower-end PC. We’re able to access them through a combination of cloud infrastructure and adapting content to suit when they like to play, what they like to play, and what they can afford. If you look at the lower-income economies in Asia, in Africa, in South America, there are still a lot of new players to go after.
GamesBeat: Do you see trends like metaverse and blockchain coming or going?
Langourieux: Nothing new on that front. It’s still a minority of work for us, not the majority. The move that is continuing is IPs that are strong in one region trying to develop their player base in other regions, or trying to expand to suit new demographics. That’s probably where we see the most movement. Besides the change in model that we already discuss, from bigger studios to smaller studios, bigger titles to leaner titles at launch.
GamesBeat: I talked to a consulting firm that was focused on IP generation. They had an interesting point of view around the usual behavior of game studios. They iterated forever on gameplay, with a fresh build every day or every week, and tested that exhaustively. But one of the results of that was that they often thought about the IP behind the game in perhaps the last three months. Things like world-building and character design were more of an afterthought. They spend so much time on gameplay that you don’t get the kind of strong IP that comes out of something like The Last of Us.
Langourieux: I grew up with that kind of approach, where you’re looking for a game design and technology breakthrough before you construct the rest of your game around it. I’m not certain that it’s a unique recipe. To paraphrase Neil from his DICE conversation, there is no unique way to arrive at a successful game. Certain teams have this method. Other teams prefer to build a universe first and figure out the game design down the road. We see both.
Something that’s more recent in PC and console gaming, though, is what you could call consumer publishing, where you have teams that are focused on creating and aligning a community with a game at the same time the game is being built. Different teams have different ways of doing it, but the common theme there is that you want to have gamers that are strong representatives of the audience associated with your development from early on. Then gradually, as they help you nail down the content of your game, you snowball them into something that’s going to be your community. When the game is ready to go out in the open, they rally the troops, the core gamers, around the game. This approach to making games in co-creation with a community wasn’t mainstream for PC and console five or 10 years ago. It’s becoming more and more frequent, though.
GamesBeat: Matthew Ball pointed out that one of the big challenges is that so many people play older games for such a long time now. Call of Duty Warzone stops me from having lots of time to play brand new games.
Langourieux: But is today’s Call of Duty Warzone the same as it was a year or two ago? The work that goes into it–it keeps changing. There’s so much new content. I don’t fully understand that argument. Yes, it’s the same name, but there is a lot of work going into adding, adjusting, expanding the content. It becomes a new experience month after month. In return, there is additional revenue coming in from the players in different ways. I don’t think that’s unhealthy at all. I don’t see how it’s different from 20 years ago, when people played a game and then bought the sequel.
GamesBeat: The point that Matthew and some others have made is that the window of time for people to try out a brand new IP that they’ve never heard of before is smaller. Live service games consume a lot of their time. They’ll try out a new game, but they won’t do it every month, perhaps.
Langourieux: That’s absolutely true. You don’t have that period of time where you’ve finished a boxed product you loved and you’re waiting for the next box to ship. Discovery is more difficult as a result.