Making it easier to hire game developers is a necessary thing in today’s troubled game industry. And so Devoted Holding, the parent of co-development firm Devoted Studios, is launching the Devoted Fusion freelancer hub to find game talent.
The online hub from Devoted Fusion, a sister to Los Angeles-based Devoted Studios, is an end-to-end self-serve portal that connects development studios, publishers and brands to pre-vetted game art and animation freelance talent around the world.
The main “why” or benefit is that the demand for scalable, expert-level freelance talent has significantly increased — Devoted Fusion says its one-stop solution cuts the process from idea to production from eight-plus weeks to 72 hours.
Through innovations like its proprietary image recognition, this one-stop hub disrupts the standard process and time required to get from idea to production said Devoted Studios leaders Jason Harris and Ninel Anderson, in an interview with GamesBeat.
And, by offering a faster, more flexible and secure solution for hiring expert-level talent – more than 3,000 artists to date, Devoted Fusion helps teams overcome the most common scalability challenges in game development, Anderson said.
“We’re not striving for massive numbers of artists, because we want the best artists,” Harris said. “Our team goes in and checks every art asset, and they tag it according to level of complexity from one to five, and then we have an algorithm that, based on that tagging, determines the seniority of an artist. So our goal is to have top talent on the platform.”
Ever-rising development costs and tighter budgets currently present the biggest threat to the success and stability of game development studios of all sizes. Increasingly, more studios struggle with scalability and are forced to run lean with just a core team to lower its burn rate, driving the need to seek co-development solutions and external, specialized freelance talent when and where it’s needed.
“After speaking with both triple-A and indie developers, it’s clear that the days of building massive in-house teams in costly, competitive markets are behind us. Yet studios still face the same pressure to deliver ambitious games and live services. The overwhelming feedback I’ve received is that moving from idea to production with external talent is slow and frustrating – often taking months,” said Harris, Devoted Studios chief commercial officer and head of Devoted Fusion. “We believe the future belongs to agile studios that scale through co-dev and freelancer partnerships. And speed is critical. Devoted Fusion was built to help studios embrace that future and get to production in under 72 hours.”
Harris estimated there are 760,000 people who say they’re freelance artists now. And with AI tools for art, it’s very hard to figure out which people are really artists.
“Everyone has been complaining,” Harris said. “I spoke to one company that is spending eight or nine weeks to find an artist.”
Origins
The impetus for Anderson was her knowledge of Ukraine, which is one of the leading regions for top freelance talent. But she knew it wasn’t easy to find and work with the best talent (how do you find them, embargoed countries, communication, secure payments, ghosting). She envisioned a central place where studios could find expert-level freelance talent who, in turn, would have a place for global exposure, portfolio protection, and the ability to work on premiere projects.
This, married with Jason’s deep expertise and thought leadership in external development – former head of EA’s Corporate Strategy, built its External Development Intelligence Group, and then founded the External Development Summit (XDS) event, made for the perfect leadership to tap into their knowledge and expertise to help shape the freelancer portal.
Going back in time, Anderson said that “my biggest mission there was to put the Ukraine on the map. I always felt like Ukrainian talent was so amazing and so underestimated. And for me, I had this mission and goal to have the talent recognized. And around 2016 like Ukraine was voted No. 1 in the world in terms of external development engineering.”
She said Ukrainian external development boomed, with outstanding realistic concept art and modeling. But the country didn’t necessarily have the best animation and visual effects talent. Much of that talent surfaced in Malaysia. So she thought about how to build “something where borders and countries don’t matter and we can staff projects according to people’s passions and skills and not their passport or ability to get a green card to work,” Anderson said.
Anderson said the company has staff that is checking all of the information on the backend to make sure the data submitted by the talent is accurate. A lot of thought also went into the search function, which uses AI to get better results for those trying to hire someone.
“We’re doing everything that helps people start working. That’s the innovation that we’re bringing into space,” Anderson said.
The goal for the long term is to get the right professionals in place within 15 minutes, Harris said.
Harris collected data from conversations with over 60 leading game studios around what is driving up game development costs, which is relevant as to why there is an increased need for flexible freelance talent and the platform.
“When I joined the games industry 13 years ago, I joined EA because they needed to think about working with external partners. Those teams were getting bigger. They were becoming more expensive. They hired me because they needed to work with external partners. And there were a lot of issues there,” he said.
He helped start the external development summit events and now he feels like the industry is in an amazing place. He noted the latest Call of Duty game, built by Microsoft’s Activision studio, has credits for more than 40 external partners.
“That’s the norm now,” he said.
Yet it can take weeks to find and hire the right VFX artist sometimes.
The challenges
Finding capable talent quickly presents a new set of challenges. For starters, the freelance artist hiring process can be daunting for studios. Slogging through infinite portfolios – many AI-generated, unverified, inconsistent, or irrelevant — without a way to search easily is frustrating and time-consuming. Those less familiar with the process may lack the necessary working knowledge of fair market pricing, creative briefs and RFPs, or contract legalese. Devoted Fusion’s global pool of pre-vetted talent and SmART-er search tools aim to reduce the time to hire significantly, while its comprehensive artist profiles and contract, invoicing, and payments backend removes the haggling and administrative roadblock.
“What’s great about Devoted Fusion is their speed; they get things moving super-fast. It helps us find the right talent quickly without searching endlessly,” said Bruce Slater, CEO of Radical Forge, in a statement. “Overall, it helps us scale up and scale down when dealing with the never-ending tight deadlines.”
Artists and animators
The Devoted Fusion team also surveyed art talent to learn their needs. Freelance artists and animators struggle to gain exposure for their portfolios to drive a steady stream of profitable, and relevant project work while also dealing with extensive paperwork, the chance of payment scams, and — worse of all, the growing threat of having their portfolios scrapped by AI.
Armed with Cloudflare’s anti-AI tech, Devoted Fusion’s hub safely puts the freelancer’s work in front of a global audience, filtering requests so only those pertinent to the talent’s skills get through, making it easier for artists to pick and choose based on their interests. The backend streamlines all the contracts, legal, and invoicing while ensuring secured payments.
“Devoted Studios has been on the frontlines of remote collaboration way before Covid made it mainstream,” said Anderson, Devoted Studios’ CEO and founder. “For us, Devoted Fusion summarizes all of our knowledge and experience into a separate offering for the industry that could be leveraged by anyone. FAST. We provide visibility and discoverability for artists so it’s not scary to be a freelancer, but instead feel empowered to choose projects about which they are passionate, while providing buyers instant access to specialized talent.”
Key features and benefits for studios
● Faster, streamlined hiring – Fusion’s proprietary image recognition system allows clients to drop in a reference image to quickly see relevant artists, combined with streamlined contracting and built-in invoicing and payment solutions;
● Shortlists of curated & pre-vetted, global talent – organize artists in themed groups to compare by key information such as art portfolio, skills, seniority, location, and rates; and send requests individually or to the entire folder, making hiring decisions faster;
● Committed care – Devoted Fusion guides developers through the process with helpful tools and a concierge to assist in finding artists, securing accurate bids, and providing support if issues arise on either side throughout the engagement.
“There are other freelance platforms out there, but a lot of them follow exactly the same model, and that’s where we’re disrupting it. You go in, you write up a job description, you post it, and anybody can apply, and you have to go through all of the applicants, check out the relevant skill sets, the information from them. We’re trying to solve that speed problem,” Harris said. “We’re disrupting this by finding relevant artists quickly.”
With the platform, an artist recruiter can drop a reference image into the portal and it will surface artists who have the same skill set and experience that matters. The recruiter can quickly see the country, tools expertise, experience, rates and then narrow down the field at a faster rate. Artists can say how available they are to take on new work.
“That’s something very unique,” Harris said. “We’re trying to gradually add all the information that’s needed so you can really get to know the talent on the platform. We’ve started with the core information. You can see their rate bands. You can see seniority, their location, the pools, their proficient in. And then see the portfolio.”
Key features and benefits for freelance artists
● Global exposure – profile visibility and hire-ability to indie, AA, independent AAA studios and service providers worldwide;
● Anti-AI scrapping – Devoted Fusion protects artists with Cloudflare’s anti-AI scraping tech to safeguard portfolios from bots. While focusing exclusively on human-created portfolios, the platform continues to monitor the evolving role of AI in creative workflows.
● Relevant, verified projects – relevant skill-matched project bids thanks to the platform’s SmART Feed, Guided Art Briefs, Artist Shortlist, and Portfolio Call features
● Secure contracts & payments – Devoted Fusion provides a secure framework for collaboration, NDAs, contracts, and other legal safeguards; all projects are pre-verified, and talent receives secure payments via Stripe.
The servcice already has a roster of 3,000-plus pre-vetted freelance game artists across categories such as animation, concept, character, and VFX, Devoted Fusion is actively curating new artists and animators to join the hub. With time, the team seeks to add more complementary tools and resources for both clients and artists, such as their free master classes and developer vision boards.
Devoted Fusion will next turn its attention to disrupting the bidding process in its mission to become the go-to place for freelance resource hiring and custom asset creation.
“While serving as head of corporate strategy and building the external development intelligence group at Electronic Arts, I witnessed first-hand the growing importance of distributed development. This led me to create the XDS event to unite the industry in addressing the unique challenges presented by external development, which has matured significantly over the past 12 years,” said Harris. “Now we need to similarly uplevel access to the freelancer ecosystem.”
Founded in 2018 by Anderson, Devoted Studios partners with game studios and entertainment companies to provide full-cycle co-development, porting, and end-to-end art solutions. Devoted Studios aims to reinvent service providers’ approach to co-development with its unique model that combines an expert production layer, custom strike teams, and dedication to care from end to end.
While Devoted Fusion has 15 people, Devoted Studios has 250 people, but it has a network of more than 1,900 talented people. Rivals include the likes of CGHero, TheXPlace, ArtStation and Upwork. Some of these aren’t game focused, and some offer neither support nor vetting.
Dozens of publishers and indie game companies are using the Devoted Fusion platform. The service has been in testing for months.
“The Devoted Fusion freelancer platform is such a cool idea! An amazing marketplace where a team such as ours, which may have fluctuating needs for creative freelancers, can always find some great talent to work with. We’ve had excellent experiences so far and hope to use the site more and more in upcoming projects,” said David Fox, game tech and design leadership at Double Coconut, in a statement.
The company isn’t yet talking about exact platform fees or the business model.
Harris said, “Companies use the platform because they don’t want to deal with the paperwork. They need to verify their country, collect their banking information. There’s so much information they need to collect. They put in NDAs in place with every single freelancer, and they involve a lot of departments. It takes a lot of time.”
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