Hire local developers before looking abroad, says Falstein

Most game developers are better off finding someone local to work in-house rather than looking abroad, says design consultant Noah Falstein.

"The reality is, even though I've done a lot of work for companies overseas, I almost always have found that their best bet is to exhaust every possibility of having somebody in-house, local, who is a native developer essentially, rather than going to the US to find somebody to do their design work," Falstein told GamesIndustry.biz.

Falstein will be giving a talk at GDC Lyon entitled "Ten Ways to Fail with a Foreign Designer," dealing with the trouble that frequently arises from collaboration across time zones.

"Most of what the talk will be about is, over the years as I've worked with groups, primarily in Europe, I've found that there are a lot of potential problems when they try to do a design with someone outside of their own country," he said.

The problems are only partially related to cultural differences, but are more complicated than that. Like the film industry, there appears to be a pecking order for game development.

Falstein notes that games invented in Japan are often popular everywhere in the world, whereas games invented in the US do well in most of the world except for Japan, and European games are rarely successful outside of their own territories.

Developers from different territories often think the solution is to work with someone from another market, but that isn't usually successful.

"I've been at many conferences in the US where we tried to figure out how to crack into the Japanese market, and hiring a Japanese designer, as far as I know, hasn't been an effective strategy.

"I think that trick of figuring out how to increase your sales in foreign markets is just a really complex and multifaceted challenge to businesses," Falstein said.

The complete interview with Noah Falstein can be read here.