XDS 2019: buzz inside the external development world

Designed to inspire and unite the community of external game developers, publishers, and vendors—the annual External Development Summit in Vancouver (Canada) is one of our favorite industry gatherings to visit! The XDS 2019 ended a few days ago, and we came back home with the hottest trends, leadership insights, best practices, and practical takeaways from the video game dev world. 

We were glad to sponsor and brand the Collaboration stage at the event that banded together industry peers for inspiring speeches and the great XDS wrap party!

Here are some highlights we’d like to share. The number one trend in external development that makes both developers and publishers happy is the even faster evolvement of the market compared to the previous year. And the key industry driver in external development over the next three years is a demand for more content, among the areas at the top: concept art, 3D characters, other 3D art, and 3D animation.

As for the engineering area, the percentage of game publishers and developers who consider co-development or full-cycle development of their games with the external dev team is constantly growing. It’s also worth mentioning that Ukraine is now considered one of the top countries is offering different types of work in game development, and this position is strengthened each year.

The most exciting part of these three productive days in Vancouver is meeting our long-term and newly-established partners to discuss our collaboration on their following promising projects. Being the only event with 650 attendees from 45 countries, among which are industry leaders like Electronic Arts, Activision, Ubisoft, Remedy, and Riot Games, interested in external development—it’s a unique chance for the best networking and discussion collaboration for art, animation, and engineering for games.

We are already in anticipation of next year’s External Development Summit!