The global view of gaming from a huge external development firm | Gilles Langourieux interview

Founded in 2004, Virtuos has grown into a big company when it comes to the production of games. As an external developer, Virtuos’ team of 3,800 professional game devs can supplement the teams at game studios and publishers as they finish their games.

The Singapore-based company has a big presence in Asia and it has worked with nearly all of the top 25 entertainment companies in the world, with either work on video or game content.

I’ve caught up with Virtuos CEO Gilles Langourieux multiple times in recent years — including last February — to get access to his unique perspective on the global picture of making games.

I recently caught up with him at the Tokyo Game Show, where the company showed off its work on the remake Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater. We talked about everything from the state of the game jobs market to the use of AI in making games.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

Gilles Langourieux: A 20-year-old game remade in Unreal 5. It’s a big deal for us to be able to take such a classic game and bring it to modern standards.

GamesBeat: That was a very long game.

Langourieux: Very. This is where we shine. If you want to do it in a reasonable time, you need to be able to line up a big team, both engineers and artists.

GamesBeat: Does Snake Eater wind up being one of your biggest projects?

Langourieux: Yes. Hundreds of people. Between 200 and 300. It was a three-year project.

GamesBeat: These remakes may be very good for this part of the industry, the external development studios.

Langourieux: They’re a significant part of the business. Not everyone can do them. If I look at what we’re doing in the game division, it might be a bit more than a third of our revenue. The rest comes from co-development engagements, where we work side by side with the client. A lot of studios can do co-development, but not so many can do remakes of large titles.

GamesBeat: Is it really starting over from the ground up?

Langourieux: Right. There’s not a lot we can re-use.

GamesBeat: Competing for something like that, what is that process like? Do you have to have already worked with the owner, like Konami in this case?

Langourieux: We’re in Japan right now. You need to establish credibility. We started working with Japan 15 years ago. We have a small team here. Most of the work was done by the China studio, but there’s proximity. It’s easy for us to visit, and vice versa. The entire business with Japan has been built from China. We started with Square Enix. We did many of the Final Fantasy remasters – X, XII, XIII – for modern platforms. We shipped Nier Automata on Switch. We just shipped Kingdom Hearts on PC. You build that reputation for delivering quality on time. Then, when someone like Konami has a big challenging project, we’re one of the first names they’ll call up. I think we’re the only name. There aren’t that many names.

You need to have a team that speaks Japanese. We have a number of Japanese producers. A studio in Europe trying to work with Konami would be more challenging. They’ve tried. It’s difficult.

GamesBeat: When is this coming out?

Langourieux: That’s not announced yet. My guess is next year, but don’t quote me on that. Dune Awakening is a more classical co-development for us, a smaller team working over a smaller period of time. We’re doing a smaller percentage of the title.

GamesBeat: How do you view the state of the industry? Are the economically tough times starting to go behind us?

Langourieux: I’m encouraged by a couple of things. When I look at our clients’ health, the majority of them had a good 2023 and a good first half of 2024. There was growth for the majority of them. You have a number of isolated cases that are problematic. A couple in Europe, a couple in Japan. But the bigger players, on average, seem to be doing okay. We looked at the data. The top 20, their growth rate is probably more than double the growth rate of the industry. That seems to indicate that concentration is continuing. The other thing we see is that revenue is coming more and more from the bigger online titles.

Concentration of bigger titles means smaller and medium-sized games are squeezed out. This is where some of the layoffs are coming from. Nobody’s counting the addition of head count at the successful studios. Game Science, Pocketpair, I guarantee you they’re not laying off. They’re hiring people. The net might not be as bad as far as the employment situation. You don’t have only losers. There are also winners. They have big, successful titles and they’re well-positioned in a niche. They’re employing. They’re giving us work too.

This year will be a year of growth for us, revenue-wise, headcount-wise. I’m not saying it’s easy. We have to mobilize our entire business development team globally to find the right projects. It’s more difficult to find projects than before. But I don’t think anyone should say that the industry is not doing well. There are still opportunities. It could accelerate next year. New hardware, large installed bases. PC is still growing, especially in emerging countries. Some of the mobile companies will be able to do better now that they’ve turned a corner on regulations. Some very big titles are on the horizon. Now there’s one more, with Assassin’s Creed.

GamesBeat: I have a bit of quantitative data now. The LinkedIn guy, Amir Satvat, who posts about people looking for work, he’s gotten very good at scraping the web for game jobs. Now he’s been aggregating related data. He estimates 275,000 people work in the game industry worldwide. There were 14,000 open jobs a few months ago, and 12,000 open now. In the last month or so things have slipped a bit. (And it improved some too since then). They were improving to a point where he thought hiring would be higher than firing on a 60-month trailing basis, starting in September. That was his estimate of the turning point. Now he’s pushed that to December, because of Microsoft’s layoffs.

Langourieux: I would challenge him a bit on China. People looking at data in the west usually underestimate China.

GamesBeat: He did a list of the top 10 cities with job openings, and none of them were in the U.S. The faster-growing areas, where they’re hiring more people, are all around the world.

Langourieux: I think there’s going to be a displacement. We’ve been very lucky, because for the last 30 years we’ve essentially had double-digit growth. Most of the successful studios have not had to challenge the way they do things. They’ve not had to look for efficiencies. Now it’s a bit more difficult, because there’s less growth. They’re all looking for efficiencies. Many of them are making layoffs. Those laid-off people end up working for companies like us. You’re still going to have large productions needing more people. The flexibility has to come from somewhere. It will come from us.

There will be a displacement, with less internal jobs at studios. Studios will get a bit more lean. That’s good for creativity, because smaller teams can iterate faster. More companies like us will help bring extra capacity and more stable jobs. When one project is over we can transition people to another project more easily than our clients.

GamesBeat: How many people do you have now?

Langourieux: We’re close to 4,000. About 3,800. We’re growing a bit. It’s not an environment where we want to grow very aggressively, but a little bit. We just added a studio in the U.K., Third Kind Games, in Leamington Spa.

GamesBeat: Do you tend to agree that things are starting to get more visibly better?

Langourieux: There is growth still. We have two divisions, art and game. The art pipeline is very full. That division tends to be occupied by the bigger games, generating content for the next iteration. Those big games that dominate the revenue are healthy. The game division works more on medium-sized and smaller games. That’s where it’s still a bit more clunky. It hasn’t fully restarted yet.

GamesBeat: The Electronic Arts investor call had an interesting line. For their college football game, they had to create 11,000 likenesses of players in three months. They were able to do that because they used AI. Does that sound normal yet to you?

Langourieux: I’ve seen EA invest in new technologies to allow them to produce their annual iterations faster and faster at a high quality level. It’s very consistent with the effort we’ve seen from them. Because of the way likenesses are created–you apply photographs to a 3D mesh. AI is very good at manipulating 2D. They can do a good job with that. It’s a question of how you transform video and photo reference into the right combination of 3D and textures. We used to do that manually. It’s very time-consuming. You always have issues with different angles. I can see AI doing it very well, that mapping.

The more interesting part of their talk was where they explained how they see AI bringing new types of gameplay. This is where the big–again, we tend to talk too much about the negative stuff and not much about the positive. We talk about how AI might cut jobs and whatnot, or break IP. But the real opportunity is elsewhere. It’s in changing game content and game experiences. We keep talking about NPCs, characters. At some point we’ll not be dealing with NPCs. We’ll be dealing with friends and companions and enemies. The relationships will be so much more realistic. That’s where I see AI taking us. EA made it clear that that’s where they want to go.

I’m simplifying, but the internet brought us multiplayer games. Mobile brought us games on the go. AI can bring us a new type of personal gaming experience. Way more believable, way more engaging. It’s not about the production time we save. It’s more about a new level of engagement that will be possible.

GamesBeat: How do you get ready for that?

Langourieux: You test everything that’s out there. You experiment. You seek opportunities to collaborate with clients on pilots. It’s not going to happen overnight.

GamesBeat: I still see new AI companies coming to me about products or funding every week. Not quite every day, but there’s still a lot of them springing up.

Langourieux: We have a backlog of about 100 different solutions to test. We have a number of solutions projects where we’re in control of the content. We use these projects to test ideas, see what works and what doesn’t. The industry needs a new technology wave if we want to accelerate growth again. We need to bring something new. Not just higher high-definition graphics. Where is the newness going to come from? I think it’s AI. Maybe haptics.

GamesBeat: It feels like, before we get new consoles, we should get to someplace where those consoles can make use of AI. If they’re going to load the consoles up with 10 times more AI processing power, there has to be something for that to do.

Langourieux: The consoles will become less relevant, because experiences are going to be streamed.

GamesBeat: If you’re Microsoft with Flight Simulator, that’s already the answer.

Langourieux: Some of the things we’re talking about are already happening on a small scale. Flight Simulator is creating a much more believable world thanks to AI. Candy Crush is delivering customized games based on AI. As we pull the thread longer, it’ll reach all the way to more complex games.

GamesBeat: I can’t think of what else I would put in a new game console. Do you need 8K? What else could we do with the technology right now?

Langourieux: I find it very interesting that we’re capable of making games for blind people and deaf people. If we can do this, we might have some changes to the interface, the way we interact with games. VR didn’t quite succeed because we’re limited in how we can control games in a 3D space. Microsoft had Kinect, and that didn’t quite work either. But if you put together the power of AI, the power of the cloud, and some new devices, we might arrive at a new interface. It’s been too long. We’ve been playing with a screen, a keyboard, and a joystick for too long.

GamesBeat: Console makers are faced with these decisions about what to include and not include in the next generation. They have to lock it in a few years before they go to production. I’m sure Nintendo is already locked in on what they’re going to do. Maybe Sony and Microsoft still have some time to decide. The interesting thing the Flight Simulator guys said is that in 2020, they made their bet that the next game would be all cloud. I think they put less than 50 gigs on your machine now. There’s some local processing, but it’s mostly streamed from the cloud. The cloud evolved so fast that it’s doable now. They didn’t have to worry about that shift. They still had 800 people working on it, but it was spread out a lot of things.

Langourieux: We’re not a centerpiece. A studio like Asobo in France is more of a centerpiece. But we are providing some elements to them. It’s a sizable project for us. We’re still working on it as we speak.

GamesBeat: I don’t know how much you see other games using technology like that.

Langourieux: We’re waiting to see more fantasy games, more stylized games adopt similar technology. It’s no longer limited by a small number of characters displayed on the screen, a small number of dialogue lines, a limited number of behaviors NPCs can enact. But I think we’re still a couple of years out.

GamesBeat: Do you have to build a specialty or hire differently to deal with that?

Langourieux: We’re going to have to work differently. I don’t know if the existing engines can do this. Perhaps there might be another generation of engines, coupled with people who have learned to create content differently. That’s why I say it’s probably a couple of years out.

If we’re talking about how to create characters who are believable actors–they talk about agents in the AI world. In our games I don’t think we’ll have agents, but let’s say actors. You could have a company like Epic embedding, in the next generation of their engine, the ability to integrate and program extremely believable actors with infinite abilities to interact with you. We’ll need character designers who know how to direct these actors. Direction will be different from simply modeling the characters and writing a script for them.

GamesBeat: It sounds like a new generation of game engines, but is that a heavy lift for them? Or is it a lighter lift, because they’re just bringing in tools that are created elsewhere?

Langourieux: I don’t think it’s trivial. We’re used to manipulating objects. AI can make these objects more intelligent. How do we direct that intelligence?

GamesBeat: Would you have any prediction on the nature of the industry’s comeback? Did we cut too many people and leave a hole in the roadmaps of a lot of game companies, where they don’t have enough games coming? Do we have a talent war that’s going to start up once we go back to more hiring than firing?

Langourieux: I don’t think the issue is that we don’t have enough content. We can agree that there’s enough content to please most gamers. They have way more games on their backlog than they can play with the time they have. What we might be short of is new experiences. Technology is only making incremental differences, not a major leap. We need a major leap to happen. I think it’s a couple of years, as I say, before the combination of AI, cloud, haptics, maybe something else–before it creates a leap between the type of games we offer and the type of games that are available today. That’s when the next wave will start.

In the meantime it will be more about displacement between the games that continue to be successful and get bigger and bigger, and the smaller ones that can’t find space anymore.

GamesBeat: Do you think there’s going to be a break between the world before Grand Theft Auto VI and the world after? Is that a pivotal game that will have a lot of influence on the rest of the industry?

Langourieux: I don’t think so. Part of me thinks that whenever you put tremendous expectations on something, it tends to disappoint. You don’t have only one type of gamer. Not everyone plays on console or PC. There’s no reason to focus on that particular title’s launch. There will be other successful games. There are many other platforms where that title won’t have an effect.

GamesBeat: Where do you think the young game developers, the people who are studying to become game developers, need to put their energies?

Langourieux: They absolutely want to understand what’s happening with AI. It would be a huge mistake to underestimate the size of the wave or consider it dirty. Yes, there are issues today, but those issues will be overcome. If I’m an artist or a programmer or a designer coming out of school, I want to be trained, or train myself, on what AI can do today and what AI will be able to do tomorrow. I want to start using these tools. That may allow me to overtake older artists, designers, or programmers who haven’t learned these skills and won’t be in a position to direct AI actors like we’ll be putting in games.

Using AI to create new stuff–that younger generation will be able to do it. The people starting at the ground floor, we’ll arm those people with AI-based creation capabilities. What they can create inside things like Roblox or Fortnite is going to be very impressive. Humans are getting older. We have more and more free time. There’s no country where there isn’t an increase in the number of devices that can support games. Even the poorest countries have an increase in PCs and smartphones. More free time, more devices. That’s going to translate into more games and more time spent playing games.

The only difficulty is that we can’t sell the same stuff year after year. We need to keep looking for innovation, ways to make things new and different.

GamesBeat: What do you think about places like the Middle East, where they’re trying to accelerate the growth of their talent base?

Langourieux: I’m not very familiar with the Middle East, but on that question, since we’re in Tokyo right now, right next to China, it’s interesting to see Chinese developers becoming very successful in game genres that were created in Japan. The Chinese developers are putting in more effort, more modernity, and achieving global success. You have a wave of talent in China that benefits from a younger talent pool than Japan. That’s been very interesting. That, I think, is going to accelerate with the success of games like Genshin Impact and Black Myth. That’s why we wanted to have you come to China. You’d be surprised.

GamesBeat: Emerging countries have more opportunities. That’s a chance to leapfrog.

Langourieux: They’re approaching with a younger mind, a fresh mind. They want content that’s more culturally suited to their audience. Nexon talks about a concept I like a lot, which is hyper-localization. It’s the ability, in an online game, to adjust the content not just for language, but events, challenges, timing that fits what different groups of players want. There’s a lot of growth to be found for existing game companies by going after these more diverse groups of players, particularly in emerging countries.

We’ve talked before about how Garena is able to dominate southeast Asia, because they customize a game that’s relatively standard in its base form, Free Fire–they really customize the content to suit each audience in Indonesia, in the Philippines, in Vietnam. If you take the Garena model, you can see that same model happening in the Middle East or in Latin America. There’s no reason why not. Maybe some of the American and Japanese publishers will realize the importance there and go in that direction, like Nexon is already doing.