Q&A with Virtuos: The Biggest Developer You Haven’t Heard Of

While the name might not be familiar, if you’ve played a recent triple-A title, there’s a chance that Virtuos had a hand in it. Since 2004, the international production company (headquartered in Singapore, with operations in Canada, China, France, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Ukraine, the United States, and Vietnam) has served as a co-developer, assisting in the creation of titles like The Callisto Protocol, Horizon: Forbidden West, and The Outer Worlds. Recently, we spoke with Christophe Gandon, Managing Director of Western Region and Samuel Stevenin, Managing Director of Art Division to find out more about Virtuos’ role in game creation.

Tech-Gaming: We often wholly attribute the development of a game to a single studio. But things are far more complex, with your organization providing significant support for studios. Can you speak on the role Virtuos plays in contemporary triple-A development? 

Christophe Gandon: Developing an AAA game involves hundreds of talent for several years. It is quite impossible for AAA game studios to have all the required talent for the whole duration of a game’s development as firstly, game development is sequential, and a team size fluctuates along the development cycle. Secondly, some areas or level of expertise could also be missing internally in a studio.

Think about how a car is manufactured: car manufacturers are not able to create everything alone on their end, they need suppliers who could provide the engine, the electronics, the suspension components, and so on. The game creation process is not as much fragmented as compared to car manufacturing, but the making of AAA games requires additional features, content, and sometimes, targeting of additional platforms that a single studio is unable to do fully by themselves.

Christophe Gandon

That is the role co-developers like Virtuos plays – to help studios create their games, be it from the prototyping phase to the final release, and with services in art, design, programming, or audio. At the same time, our global team of over 3500 members can be activated at the different phases to help clients manage team size fluctuations and reduce the time it would have taken them to recruit, onboard, and train at scale.

TG: Virtuos has 21 offices around the world that handle everything from support for art, porting duties, and even the creation of different game components. Are offices engineered for specialization or flexibility? 

CG: In short, we work as a platform as much as possible to provide flexibility to our clients. Our offices worldwide operate as nodes as they are set up to be in proximity to clients, talent pools, and game development hubs. They can cover specializations while providing flexibility since Virtuos operates through a distributed development model. What this means for our partners is that they have access to all the services they require, regardless of the Virtuos studio they are in contact with, while enjoying a single point of contact for seamless collaboration.

Samuel Stevenin: Specifically for art – our studios have both flavours as some are able to tackle a broad scope and can develop art end-to-end under the same roof, while others are highly specialized around a specific production step. The reasons for this variety are multiple:

• Time zone – Virtuos aims to offer clients creative hubs in the same time zone. Our Montreal studio was created with this idea in mind, a highly creative concept art team located close to our North American clients.
• Talent pool – each region has access to different sets of talent. All Asian studios have, for example, access to large pools of talent who could be trained for any field of game development.
• Historical – some of our acquired studios have long-standing expertise. CounterPunch was acquired for its strong, high-quality facial animation and it has added a new cinematic capability to Virtuos, complementing Sparx’s expertise in stylized keyframe animation.

Samuel Stevenin

T-G: Let’s get into specifics. I understand that Virtuos handled the car modeling for one of the Forza Motorsport titles. Can you walk us through the process? 

SS: Glass Egg, a Virtuos studio since 2022, has long been collaborating on the successful Forza series since its first installment in 2005. Glass Egg is a great example of a specialized Virtuos studio. For the last 23 years, the studio’s focus has been to work on racing games and high-quality car creation. Our team’s high-end car creation pipeline has been applied to many other well-known racing titles. The work usually begins right after the client sends us the references – our artists build from exterior to interior, including the engines, wheels, badges, and lights, as well as many other details, all in super high fidelity. We also handle art and technical quality assurance at the end of the pipeline, setting up car attributes and fine-tuning directly inside the clients’ proprietary engines to make sure the car looks beautiful and will function accurately in game.

T-G: What’s been one of the more difficult projects for Virtuos? 

SS: Every project comes with its own set of challenges. And that makes it extra fulfilling for an external developer like Virtuos to come onboard and problem solve together with our partners. Having delivered content for over 1,500 games across consoles, PC, and mobile, we have accumulated know-how and delivered solutions for almost all platforms, game genres, industry and proprietary game engines. That also enables us to observe patterns, identify and mitigate risks as early as possible in the production pipeline.

T-G: Games often exhibit a cultural element. It’s a bit of a simplification, but Western role-playing games often champion autonomy where the player constructs the protagonist’s journey, while Eastern games might favor the payoff from a scripted trek. How does Virtuos strive to maintain this creative integrity? 

CG: The beauty of having 21 offices worldwide is that we have a global workforce of game creators located in both Eastern and Western markets, and from diverse cultural backgrounds. An example is Mahokenshi which combines strategy and deck-building – a top game genre in France – with a design inspired by Japanese mythology. It is developed by Game Source Studio, our team based in Paris. Having employees, many of whom are young digital natives, situated on the ground provides us with a good understanding of local nuances and the ever-changing market needs, and they can often act as a first layer of sense-checking.

T-G: Botched launches have fostered a feeling of suspicion around ports. Given your expertise, what are some of the causes for this phenomenon?

CG: It is not a new phenomenon as the demand for gameplay consistency has been on the rise since the 2020s. In the past, a game was developed for the device it will run on. However, the rise of cross-platform play in recent years with games such as Genshin Impact and Fortnite means that gamers expect the same – or highly similar – experience regardless of the platform they are accessing the game from.

For developers, this requires switching to a game-centric approach where you offer the core game mechanics across varying specifications and go beyond porting to adapt and incorporate unique platform features to deliver the best possible user experience. A recent example would be NieR:Automata The End of YoRHa Edition, the Switch version of NieR:Automata that Virtuos handled, which we added the ability to activate motion controls using the Joy-Con or Pro controller.

T-G: Virtuos handled the adaptation of NieR:Automata to the Switch, which is widely considered a feat with technical performance that outshone the original release. What are some of the factors that helped make this happen? 

CG: This adaptation was a real challenge, but we tackled it the best way we could. The reasons for pulling it off included a close partnership with our partner team: we were able to propose some visual and design choices that let us respect the original title, alongside some optimizations that made the game run smoothly on the targeted platform. We also had thorough preparations and were able to leverage years of know-how on the Switch’s technical capabilities. Combining that experience with a team who were total fans of the franchise allowed us to anticipate at an early stage of the development what matters for a Switch version and how to do it.

T-G: Conversely, the port of The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Edition struggled at launch, but was subsequently remedied. What went wrong? 

CG: It should be considered that the scope of Spacer’s Choice Edition involved more work than a strict port. Our teams improved character detail, increased environmental dressing density, reworked the facial animation system, overhauled all lighting and upgraded most VFX. This added a great deal of additional complexity to consider.

As Obsidian and Private Division have shared, performance issues were identified after release, in particular with higher-end graphic cards on PC versions. PC is a very difficult platform with no fixed hardware and software, so there is an infinity of combinations between the different systems. So even if we anticipated potential issues as much as possible, and tested a lot of possible combinations as the publisher and us did, there is sometimes still a combination that creates issues. It is incredibly difficult to cover all cases, and we’ve seen that a lot of developers worldwide face challenges with PC adaptations. For this project, we released four patches to-date as fast as we could to fix issues and the learnings have equipped us to take faster action as needed for future iterations.

T-G: Last March, Virtuos announced a new production studio located in Dalat, Vietnam. Can you walk us through the process that Virtuos goes through when scouting acquisitions? 

SS: We look for studios with a cultural fit and which we can help them grow rapidly by providing access to clients and global projects, or the complementary expertise of our other studios. The new studios would also enable the expansion of Virtuos’ capabilities to provide more end-to-end solutions to our clients, for instance, the addition of CounterPunch and its expertise in facial animation. Our overall aim is to build presence in all key locations where our partners are based, so we can operate more seamlessly in the same time zones.

T-G: At one time, Virtuos also assisted with film production with the creation of 3D art. But at present, the focus seems to be on games. Can you explain the reason for focusing on interactive media? 

SS: We have contributed to films and continue to do so, and are privileged to count Industrial Light & Magic as a client. It has been interesting to extend the know-how we have built with game engines to other industries and media formats.

However, our focus has always been on video games and the production of core content. Virtuos was founded for that, and our goal remains to be the best and largest external developer helping studios create core content for blockbuster games. Games are the most immersive form of interactive media, and we continue to see great opportunities in the business, as well as for our talent worldwide to work on great projects.

Tech-Gaming would like to thank Christophe Gandon, Samuel Stevenin
Pierre-Louis Barbier, and Jodenia Chan for their efforts with this interview.