30–35% Delivery Increase and $200K OpEx

The Context

Ubisoft's XDefiant was a live-service title built across four studios, Sydney, San Francisco, Toronto, and Osaka, serving 12M users. Constant content delivery, cross-studio coordination, and growing marketing demands placed significant pressure on a front-end team that was severely under-resourced for the scale of the project.

The Problem

Marketing collateral was outsourced at $300K per year with slow turnaround and no internal knowledge retention. The Sydney front-end team of two lacked the cinematic rendering capability needed to produce in-game content and onboarding videos. At the same time, the metagame pipeline across all four studios was engineering-heavy and highly waterfall, features moved into engine prototyping before stakeholders had approved direction, making iteration prohibitively expensive.

The Bottleneck

Engine prototyping is costly to iterate. Placing approval gates late in the process meant significant engineering hours were committed before sign-off was secured. Double-handling was rampant, work was regularly revisited across teams after the fact. The outsourcing model compounded this: slow vendor cycles, no capability growth, and a widening gap between what the front-end could produce and what the platform needed.

The Solution

Three interlocking interventions addressed the cost, process, and capacity problems simultaneously.

• Brand Art team, Secured $200K from the outsourcing budget to build a 3-person Brand Art team. The unit was dual-purpose: rendering game engine assets for the front-end while producing marketing teasers and trailers in parallel with in-game content. Internal capability replaced external cost.
• Pipeline reinvention, Reinvented the metagame pipeline across all four studios by extending the Figma prototyping process. Whitebox prototypes were approved as functional proofs before any engine work began. Moving engine approval gates further back eliminated premature engineering commitment and cut double-handling by 30–35%.
• Team scaling, Scaled the Sydney front-end from 2 to 9, UX/UI designers, UI programmers, engineers, and tech artists. Each hire was justified through roadmapping and cost-to-return-value proofing, securing sustained investment over the engagement.

The Results

$200K redirected from outsourcing into a permanent internal Brand Art capability. Gate approval rates increased 30–35% across four studios by eliminating costly mid-cycle iteration. The Sydney front-end team scaled 350%, becoming the largest and most capable front-end team on the project, delivering some of XDefiant's most critical features.

"People assume that the systems they work within are immutable, but stopping to sharpen your axe will enable you to chop wood faster and more precisely."

— Nick Strine, Founder, SemiMassive