NOTE: Due to Glass Egg Digital Media’s wishes of guests refraining from taking pictures in their office spaces because of legality issues regarding their outsourcing partners, today’s blog will be lacking in photos from the per usual. Instead, stay tuned for tomorrow’s blog, you will not want to miss it.
Today was the day, if any, that I was able to channel my inner nerd as we headed to our next company site visit, Glass Egg Digital Media. Though Glass Egg is extremely well sought out by many of the largest video game companies in the world, it is not surprising that many people have not heard of this company before.
Glass Egg Digital Media is a game developer and art production facility company. They primarily deal in outsourcing 2D, 3D, and concept art—which in this case is when a video game company assigns work to Glass Egg rather than completing it internally to reduce costs. The company’s three main focuses in video game production are: game design, art assets, and animation. Specifically for art assets, Glass Egg is currently devoting most of its resources to the design of environments in video games due to its larger demand.
With that said, Glass Egg’s main forte is in the design of cars. Why cars exactly? Well according to Guillaume, Chief Operating Officer of Glass Egg, cars are straight forward to create since not much creativity is involved in the design process since the cars being tasked already exist. Further, cars are easier to make photorealistic in comparison to other objects such as fantasy structures, characters, or spaceships.
To give an idea how big Glass Egg is in the video game industry, some of its notable clients are: Microsoft Studios, EA, Ubisoft, Activision, and Sony, just to name a few. As for some of its outsourcing projects, I am sure you have heard of Call of Duty, Titanfall, and Forza. If you search “Forza” online, you will notice how shockingly realistic the cars in the racing video game appear. Believe it or not, almost all the cars in-game are designed by Glass Egg.
Now what makes Glass Egg one of the most reputable companies is that after 14 years of being in the industry and gaining invaluable experience, having a talented 250 staff team with top notch technical skills, and building trust and loyalty with their partners, they have truly secured a strong reputation for themselves.
Interestingly enough, the staff of Glass Egg is comprised of individuals all across the world—a surprising amount from Japan since the country is one of the largest forces in the video game industry. They are constantly in search of new talent and hope to increase their staff by 40 more by next year.
As for the work Glass Egg takes on—although most of it is client based—they also focus on non-client work as well as a means to train and improve their staff and build their portfolio to gain new clients.
Yet Glass Egg is not without its problems. One of the largest issues that it is currently facing ever since it was founded is with diversification. As a result of them focusing and refining their ability primarily in designing cars, Glass Egg has been struggling with breaking out of this comfort zone they have built for themselves and expanding their work in to other markets. This in turn has unfortunately put the team of Glass Egg into a predicament such that they can not take on new projects that require more sophisticated high-end designs. The reason for this partially has to do with the company being based in Vietnam. Vietnam is not an ideal location to hire individuals from other countries who have experience in designing various assets because the fact of the matter is: Vietnam is still underdeveloped so people don’t want to move here just yet.
However, Vietnam has also proven to be a great location for Glass Egg to do business. By being located in Ho Chi Minh City, Glass Egg has been able to attract many Vietnamese to join their team. And depending on how you view the matter, labor in Vietnam is much cheaper than in America, China, or Japan which has aided in Glass Egg’s growth. Which brings us to our final point.
As discussed in the meeting, the team at Glass Egg sees a bright future for the longevity of the company since there is still a great demand for outsourcing by video game companies and a continued global interest in the video game market. In addition, to cope with its increase in staff, Glass Egg definitely sees itself expanding oversees in the near future and building new locations to remedy this situation. But as of now, they are still going to focus on outsourcing for the video game industry.
Until next time friends
-TK
