Outsourcing in the gaming world

Good post mortem in Gamasutra of American McGee’s Grimm.  Interesting commentaries for the apps. outsourcing crowd:

 To avoid loss of face, a Chinese employee will not say that he only understood half of what his expat colleague tells him. This leads to misunderstandings, and ultimately to a lot of time lost.

We encountered a lot of these problems working with the outsourcing team that made all our 3D models. The same mistakes would be made over and over again because the modeling team didn’t understand the comments we made on their work, package names would have spelling errors in them, etc.

Towards the end of the project, these problems gradually became smaller, as Chinese artists started to understand English better and expatriates became more proficient in the Chinese language. More bilingual support, both at Spicy Horse and at the outsourcing studio, would have helped a lot in the beginning, though.
 

Globally, the experience is positive.