Remote game development during lockdowns and beyond

Author: by Teradici

Presented by Teradici

About one year into the pandemic lockdowns, the video game industry has largely settled into the realities of remote work. But are game developers settling for piecemeal solutions when there are better, more dedicated remote working products out there?

Teradici, which won an Engineering Emmy Award in 2020, is a company that has been facilitating remote work for 16 years for entertainment companies and more recently video game studios.

Learn how Teradici enables remote game development from anywhere

Remote work in these industries typically requires visualization of difficult workloads. Ian Main, technical marketing principal at Teradici, says his company’s PCoIP technology meets the security and production requirements to handle the rigors of game development for teams big and small. (Full video interview above.)

“I think people went home [from their offices as if] it was an emergency,” he said when asked why a team might switch to Teradici at this point in time. “They took their computers home, they had piecemeal solutions, security was secondary.

“You can take advantage of companies like ours…to build a clean solution with a single protocol,” he says.

With Teradici, teams can choose the infrastructure they want, with any cloud, data center, device, OS, and application combination so there is flexibility in setting up a virtual workspace.

Main says Teradici customers include multiple educational institutions such as Vancouver Film School, as well as medium-sized studios such as 130-person Liverpool-based Firesprite (The Playroom VR for PlayStation 4, The Persistence) and other larger game studios.

“[Firesprite] basically just set up a new workstation back in the office, which they'll go back to at some point,” Main says, “and they're growing with these remote workers everywhere.”

While there is light at the end of the tunnel and hope that offices and physical spaces will open back up sometime this year, Main says remote working solutions will remain important.

“Fundamentally, people need to collaborate together,” he says. “So I think across all working industries, we see this new hybrid model that will evolve, where there is some part at home and some part back in the studio...The office will be new, and you'll need technologies to support that collaboration.”

And studios are now seeing how they can draw from a talent pool that isn’t limited to geography. “No longer employees need to be 30 miles from their office, right?” Main says. “They can move away from that studio and live out in the suburbs or in rural areas if they wish.

“And studios no longer need to hire downtown, they can go find people internationally…so this flexibility is really awesome.”

Learn how Teradici enables remote game development from anywhere