There new studio used to be a church, sunday school, and factory buildings. Now Rare has God on their side .
Rare to open a second studio facility in Birmingham
The site is "ideally placed for recruiting new staff", Microsoft says
It was rumoured late last year, and now has been officially confirmed. Rare will open this April a second studio in Birmingham in Digbeth’s Fazeley Studios facilities as a way “to change the current model of games development working practices,” according to a Microsoft press release. These new facilities will “complement Rare’s longstanding headquarters in Twycross,” Leicestershire, as “Fazeley’s main area of focus will be as a production, test and usability site to accommodate Rare’s evolving methodology in game creation.”
“Fazeley studio will be home to some 90 staff working on new Rare games although number will fluctuate with the development cycle,” Microsoft states. This may still come as a surprise for some after Rare’s restructuring process in early 2009 when the future of several employees was compromised. But, according to the PR, “Digbeth is ideally placed for recruiting new staff” since it’s “close to several universities and colleges”.
The Birmingham Post indicates that “Fazeley Studios occupies a 150-year old converted Unitarian chapel and adjoining Sunday School buildings as well as extensive former factory buildings converted to light and spacious studios.”
Rare’s Studio Head Mark Betteridge had this to share with the press: “The old way of making games just doesn’t work anymore, we need to be much more flexible in how we staff a team and setting up new facility in Digbeth will help us to do this. Its central location and the nature of other businesses in the area make it a very appealing environment in which to work. While we are committed to keeping our headquarters in Twycross, we feel a second studio in a more urban location will be appealing to some staff.”
In a long interview with Games Industry Betteridge shared some further ideas about why this was the moment to take this decision: “Teams have become somewhat unwieldy in the development process – very inflexible, very expensive. Over the last six or seven years it’s really started to get out of hand, and companies and teams that were having great success before are realising the same thing.” This won’t mean an exodus from their present facilities, though: “We believe very firmly that Twycross is in our DNA, it’s still going to be very much the centre of of the creative hub of Rare, but the way that development demands are now we need the availability of a greater skillset of people – and we also need them on a time frame that’s more flexible, rather than just employing everybody full time with whatever expertise they have. [...] The creative hub will definitely remain at Twycross, there won’t be a big restructure here or anything of that order.”
And how many people would those new facilities be able to house and with which purpouse? Betteridge answers that, “ballpark, we’ve been looking at in the region of 40-50 people in core development and probably a similar number again in test. Now, test is an important one because while we have a large test area in Twycross which has expanded over the years as projects have gotten bigger [...] Because of the nature of Natal – and it would have been exactly the same with the Wii – to test it properly you need a larger physical space than you had before. [...] With Natal, we believe test is extremely important to get the balance and the content of the game right – because a lot of the people that Microsoft will be appealing to with this technology won’t be traditional games players, and we need to test with a wide range of people, different ages, demographics, and so on.”
Considering the benefits of outsourcing vs. insourcing approach, Betteridge thinks: “Outsourcing is something that a lot of companies have done – especially with art – but it’s not a silver bullet. We believe more in a term I’ve used before and that’s insourcing. Avatars was the perfect example of a small project that we were able to put forward to Microsoft, which was then green-lit and went into full production… we developed that project with just the core people here as employed by Rare, probably four or five people was all it was. But there was sometimes in excess of 30 people, sometimes contractors, working on that project. That’s a simple example, but it shows how we’re able to think. [...] Other people have been doing traditional outsourcing of for many years, and we have some experience of it, but for us – and for fast iteration on fun gameplay – it’s very important that we have a hands-on contact with how this content will be created.”
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