Fuse Games used distributed development to build Star Wars: Galactic Racer

Fuse Games built Star Wars: Galactic Racer with a core team that was below 75 people for most of development, according to CEO Matt Webster. He told GamesIndustry.biz at Game Republic New Horizons that the average was a lot smaller than that. The article contrasts this with traditional AAA in-house teams of hundreds, and notes that Rockstar was revealed this week to have more than 4,700 staff.

Webster calls the approach distributed development and splits it into three tiers by distance from the core team. The furthest is traditional outsourcing, such as art assets, often in lower cost locations. The middle tier is external development, where an outside group gets a self-contained piece of work. The example given is the photo mode, which went to an outside studio. Webster says working in Unreal made that kind of self-contained hand-off possible.

The closest tier is co-development. Those partners join Fuse's stand-ups, Slack channels and code base, and Webster describes them as an extension of the team. All of Fuse's co-development studios are in the UK, partly to share a time zone, since he says close work needs high-frequency communication. Manchester-based Expression Games recently confirmed it worked on the game. Webster also says co-development is now more attractive to studios, partly because games take so long to make.

Webster's stated reason for the model is to avoid growing and shrinking the team. He says layoffs hurt people, and that the lost knowledge is probably far more expensive to get back. His advice to other studios is that the model can't just be applied to an existing setup and has to be configured from the start. He adds that every extra partner puts a disproportionately higher load on the core team.

On results, the PS5 version sits at a Metacritic score of 88. Webster says it is too early to tell whether sales met expectations, as the game was only through its first weekend. The game came out three and a half years after Fuse was formed in early 2023, and has been patched four times since release. Webster says the studio has ideas for a next game but is focused on servicing this one.