Hi There, We're planning to re-shape our company to start selling services as outsourcers, but we're not very sure how. We've got experience and assets (we have 9 games in the market and sold quite a bit), but are clueless about how to contact game studios to sell our services. Any pointers or reads (or websites) to which I could address myself in order to make this less haphazardous? What things should I expect for the game studios to ask of me? Will they ask for pictures of my offices, or a staff roll or something like that?

There are several different approaches to marketing your services.
One way is networking. You start going to all the conferences you can, and start making contacts. Setting up a booth can be expensive, but is a second-level approach beyond simply being there and meeting people serendipitously.
Another way is to get an agent. Good agents are choosy about which clients they take on, though.
You can also hire someone to be your in-house marketing person.

Things I would want to know as a buyer of your services:

1. What games has your company developed and shipped? Name/Platform/Sales
2. What services are you offering? Art, programming, audio, QA...?
3. What consoles have you worked on? PC/360/Wii/NDS/PS2...
4. What dev tools do you use?
5. How big is your team and what is your burn rate? You may need to prepare resumes for your team members outlining their experience.
6. When can they start?

You may also be asked to do a test as part of the due diligence process to analyze quality, timing and management pipeline.

Many outsource companies started off by partnering with local developers and then transitioned to bidding for larger projects from the publishers when they had more experience. As Tom noted, conferences are a good starting point for introductions and Linkedin has a lot of groups dedicated to game development where you can network. Good luck.

Thanks for the info :)

Personnel is one thing our company is quite strange in. We are just 2. We sold about 600k copies of our products, but we are in need of these outsourcing jobs to be able to hire people and keep them with a steady-ish income.

Making our own games as a sole source of income has proven to be way too unpredictable :

Is there any chance we may get simple jobs for DS/PSP/iPhone assets just by sending mails to studios, or registering us at Gamasutra as art contractors?

The conventions thing sounds best, but given that i'm pretty far away from LA or Leipzig, expenses would ensue.

Quote: Original post by Jorgegs
1. Is there any chance we may get simple jobs for DS/PSP/iPhone assets just by sending mails to studios, or registering us at Gamasutra as art contractors?
2. The conventions thing sounds best, but given that i'm pretty far away from LA or Leipzig, expenses would ensue.

1. I wrote the answer to this question before you asked it! http://www.sloperama.com/advice/lesson50.htm. By all means, you should get listed on Gamasutra. Cold emailing probably won't be very effective.
2. Yes. It costs money to make money. You should also use LinkedIn, the IGDA, any other networking opportunities you can think of.

Hey Tom, I get what you're saying. It's as if you've read all of Douglas Adams' work, with all of his "improbability" gibberish.

Maybe I should have phrased it as "how improbable is it for us to land a contract doing A and B"

Anyways, I noticed I had read a lot of your site a while back, but partially dismissed it because I couldn't discern how up-to-date that info was... or how serious :P

I've read some articles about this on Gamasutra, but they're generally dated a couple or more of years back, so maybe they don't really apply to today's marketplace.

I don't want to come out behaving like someone who got freezed in 2001 and woke up.

Quote: Original post by Jorgegs
1. I had read a lot of your site a while back, but partially dismissed it because I couldn't discern how up-to-date that info was...
2. or how serious :P
3. I've read some articles about this on Gamasutra, but they're generally dated a couple or more of years back, so maybe they don't really apply to today's marketplace.

1. See #3.
2. Yes. It's all a big joke. I should go into comedy!
3. What is the cutoff line beyond which we should ignore all old written material? Is it 2000? 2002? 2004? Or should we just throw out all written material as soon as it reaches 12 months of age?
Nothing in Shakespeare applies anymore. People have changed.
Nothing in Plato should be read again. Brains are different now.
Nothing in the Bible should be regarded seriously. Especially the stuff that's even more than 2000 years old. [Retroactive sarcasm][/Retroactive sarcasm]

Even when all game distribution is digital and packaged products no longer exist, a lot of the principles written about in books and on websites will still contain a lot of useful information.

yeah, I get the message anyways.

But really, some topics to have quite a small frequency for going out of date.

Mh... market analysis for example :p

But I get the basics. We're shaping up assets to present ourselves now. Thanks!