Indeed, making the relationship between the studio and the outsourcer work smoothly is often the highest hurdle in the outsourcing process, says Gilles Langourieux. As founder and CEO of one of the largest outsource companies in the industry, Shanghai-based, four-year-old Virtuos Ltd., he is on the receiving end of all that developers do -- and don't do -- to achieve a good relationship.

While his goal is to take a load off the studio's shoulders, to do that successfully, he says, the studio needs to put in some extra effort in a few key areas.

"Pre-production is a must," he explains. "Every asset to be produced must be clearly identified on an asset list and must be linked to clear specs, references, and samples. There should be no room for interpretation, which means that production documentation needs to be more detailed than if it were for internal use only."

Another potential risk when outsourcing is quality consistency which can be lower, he says, because the developer's art director or lead artist can't walk around the artists' workstations all day long and pinpoint issues in real-time.

One last hurdle occurs when the developer requires the use of its in-house tools and either doesn't supply them or doesn't train the outsourcer in their use.

Given Virtuos' size -- with over 350 staffers in Shanghai and in the recently opened operation in Chengdu, China's fourth largest city -- Langourieux says his company has teamed up with most of the major developers and provided services that focus on art, animation, co-development, programming, and QA. Last year, Virtuos produced 3D art and animation for 13 of the top 20 game companies.

"Let's just say that when you play a leading shooter or a sports title or an MMO or the latest RTS," he says, "you have more than a 50% chance of coming across art that we produced."

His experience has been that while the due diligence process at most of his clients is fairly standard, the extent to which it is carried out is not. Some developers visit Virtuos for a quick one or two hour meet-and-greet visit and run a simple test run on one asset, while others subject Virtuos to full-day audits and several consecutive pilot runs with a different focus each time -- quality, consistency, timely deliveries, and so forth.

Although Virtuos rarely has the opportunity to do the same due diligence on its clients, says Langourieux, it does its best to get a feel for the developer and for the project.

"We rely on the developer's reputation, the meetings we have with them, and the pilot runs which greatly help us assess whether we can be successful working together," he explains. "Sometimes we push back on projects which we don't see as appropriate for offshore outsourcing. If both the complexity and the risk of the project are high -- and it is the first time we're working with that client -- we believe it is our responsibility to propose to the developer that perhaps they ought to start with smaller steps before outsourcing offshore."