The cover story of February’s Wired was about the ongoing trend of tech outsourcing (ie, sourcing programming/IT work from places like India, China, etc). It is quite an extensive article and among other things, covers the anger that “local” workers have when so many jobs are outsourced. Understandable.

To some extent, this has been a small (but growing) issue for game developers. Many American, European and Japanese teams are either trimming their staff and sourcing out basic code/art tasks, or the teams are being disbanded altogether because whole projects are being sourced to cheaper countries. Some industry folks are concerned…

I say this is great! The best part of the story was a side-bar by Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson. He implored that we all should just go with the flow, that complaining/etc would not be able to do much against strong market/economic factors. And, most importantly, he said, this frees us up to do the fun stuff, the innovative stuff, the big idea work - then ship it out to get it produced/maintained… I agree. In many ways, this is what smart studios are already doing…

Of course, I’d contend with his somewhat biased point of view that it is only the Americans that can come up with the innovative ideas. But, that is a whole other debate ;)