Vitor de Magalhaes

Vitor de Magalhaes is Chief Revenue Officer and Co-Founder at Companion Group, an independent and fully-remote external engineering studio for live service games. They are officially recognised as one of the fastest growing startups in Europe and service AAA clients across the games industry. Vitor holds a degree in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford, with a final Master's thesis on gaming technology clusters across the UK and Japan. He was an early employee of multiplayer gaming tech unicorn, Improbable, playing a vital role in their $500m investment raise and parallel client acquisition. He was also integral in the acquisition of codev group MPG, scaling them from 30 to 400+ employees ahead of an eventual sale to Keywords for nearly $100m.

The Great North American Exodus - Building Teams in a Globalized World

AAA game development is entering an era of balkanization, with delivery increasingly being done outside of just a centralized core development team. While developers have been accustomed to outsourcing non-central functions like QA, Loc and Art for decades, roles previously deemed to be intrinsic to any team's identity (i.e. design and engineering) are now being increasingly supported, or even led by, outside teams. Nowhere is this trend being felt more severely than on the US West Coast, where the jobs market is hemorrhaging talent while places like Europe, Canada and South America remain mostly flat or even positive in terms of job loss and rehiring ratios.

In a world where those jobs do not resurface in the US due to a perception of low cost efficiency against an increasingly competitive globalized workforce, how do you build your teams and games within this new paradigm? What management structures are needed to lead these more diverse and cross-functional teams? And do we agree that this new normal is a driver for quality and innovation rather than just a way to squeeze margins for a vertical that's been struggling to grow beyond its historic audiences?