When players think about the studios behind their favorite games, they usually think of the names on the box, like the Bethesdas, the Konamis, the EAs of the world. But more often than not, those games aren’t built by a single studio anymore. Behind the scenes, there’s a growing network of teams helping bring these projects to life, and few have scaled alongside that shift quite like Virtuos.
Over the past two decades, Virtuos has expanded from around 100 developers in the mid-2000s to nearly 4,000 employees today. In that time, the company has grown to work on, according to CEO Gilles Langourieux, roughly 100-150 games each year.
It’s the kind of scale that would make Virtuos one of the largest companies in game development—even if most players don’t realize it. The studio has worked on games like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remaster, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, Mortal Kombat 1, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, and dozens more.
But that growth didn’t happen by accident. It came at a time when the industry itself was rapidly expanding. For years, game development operated in what Langourieux described as an environment where “there were never enough people to make games.”
“For a long time, as long as we could find and train really good people, finding work for them was relatively easy,” he said.
But hiring alone doesn’t explain Virtuos’ rise. Outsourcing has long been part of game development, but it hasn’t always been easy to manage. Different teams, different time zones, and different pipelines can quickly create friction. Langourieux says, however, that Virtuos’ success has been building around that problem.
“Our business is not just about finding talent,” he said. “It’s also creating that environment where we make it easier for clients to work with these teams because external development or outsourcing is not easy.”
Virtuos’ Global Model Built for Modern Development
A big part of that approach comes down to how the company is structured. Virtuos operates globally, with teams across various continents, allowing it to tap into multiple talent pools while staying close to its partners. Internally, the company refers to this as a “gloco” model, or a global-and-local model.
“We have large studios in Asia, in Europe, and in North America tapping into these talent pools,” Langourieux said. “And to facilitate the collaboration, having local studios working locally with clients is extremely useful.”
That structure also helps solve one of the biggest challenges in modern AAA development: teams don’t stay the same size throughout a project. They grow and shrink depending on the stage of development, and managing that fluctuation has become increasingly difficult for studios.
“What we’re doing is we’re helping our clients absorb some of that fluctuation, have more steady, smaller, but more steady internal teams,” Langourieux said. “And we help them flex by adding the number of experts that they need at a certain point and then reducing when they no longer need them.”
For years, that model aligned perfectly with the industry’s rapid growth. But that environment has started to change.
“More recently, the dynamics have shifted,” Langourieux said. “It has become less automatic and more about us demonstrating the value that we are creating for our clients.”
That value can also help the industry in a different, more stable way. Over the last handful of years, layoffs have been piling up. And while Virtuos has been no exception, though he said that it was done to adjust the type of employees they have rather than reduce headcount, Langourieux believes that by working with a co-development studio, companies don’t have to grow a team to a large scale only to let people go after a single project is done.
By working on the number of projects at a time that they are, he says that when a game is done, and they’re no longer needed, the company can just move people to a different project while keeping them employed.
In many ways, Virtuos’ growth reflects a broader shift in how games are made. The traditional model of a single studio handling everything is becoming less common, replaced by a more flexible system built around smaller core teams supported by external partners.
Virtuos may not be a household name, but its footprint across the industry continues to grow. And as development becomes more complex, that kind of support is becoming harder to ignore.
In other news, read about the studio currently working on the in-development The Lord of the Rings game that’s backed by the Abu Dhabi Investment Office. And for even more Insider Gaming delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for our newsletter.
Mike has been covering the gaming industry since 2012, and has reported on some of the largest events in the industry while also working as an investigative reporter. Outside of…
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