Large AAA productions are rarely made by one team any more. A lead studio might work with two or three co-development partners, an external art team, a porting partner and a backend provider, all on the same game at the same time. That gives a publisher the capacity to hit its dates, but it also creates a lot of joins, and each one is a place where work can stall, overlap or fall between teams.
Good governance is what keeps those joins working. We have run co-development from both sides of the table, as the partner and as the lead studio, and these are the practices that make the biggest difference.
The most common problem in multi-team productions is unclear ownership. When two teams both think they own a system, work gets duplicated. When neither does, it gets missed. Before work starts, map each feature, system and content area to a single owning team, and decide which areas a partner owns outright and which they support inside a team led by someone else. Write it down and revisit it at every milestone.
Every team should work in the same source control, against the same main branch, with the same build pipeline. Separate branches that merge back once a month feel safer early on and cause painful integration later. Agree integration windows, branch rules and who can approve changes to shared systems, and make the current build available to every team every day.
Each team brings its own habits. One team's finished feature can be another's first pass. Set shared definitions of done for code, content and UX, including performance budgets, test coverage, localization and accessibility requirements. Publish them where every team can see them, and apply them the same way to internal and external work.
Milestones work best when they describe what the game can do at the end of them, such as a playable level hitting its frame rate target on every platform, and include clear acceptance criteria. Time-and-effort milestones make it hard to tell whether a partner is on track until it is too late.
Name a lead on each team who speaks for it, and give them a regular forum with the other leads. A weekly cross-team meeting focused on dependencies and risks, with a shared risk log, catches most problems early. Partners should be in the same chat channels and planning sessions as internal teams wherever possible, so they hear about changes when everyone else does.
External teams need access to builds, tools and source code to do their jobs. Give each team the access it needs for the areas it owns, review it regularly, and remove it promptly when people leave. Clear rules here protect the game and stop partners waiting days for permissions.
Every team will hit blockers that it cannot solve alone. Agree in advance who a partner goes to when a dependency slips, who can make a decision when teams disagree, and how quickly they should expect an answer. A clear escalation path turns arguments that would drag on for weeks into decisions made in days.
Beyond milestones, look at how each relationship is working. Are handovers smooth? Are the same people still on the project? Is the partner raising risks early? Short, regular reviews with each partner lead give both sides a chance to fix small problems before they grow.
Rocket Science Group is a video games solutions company, and our co-development work is led by Atomic Theory, our studio for co-development, gameplay and UX. We embed with lead studios, take ownership of the areas we are given and drive them through to delivery, working in your pipeline from the first week. Because the group also covers backend and online infrastructure, game server hosting, live operations and recruitment, we can keep working with you after launch, through the whole life of the game.
If you are planning a production with several teams, talk to us about how we can help.
It is the set of rules and habits that keep several teams working well on one game: who owns what, how builds are shared, what counts as done, how milestones are accepted and how problems are escalated.
Give every area a single owner, keep all teams on one build pipeline, share definitions of done, set outcome-based milestones and hold regular cross-team reviews of dependencies and risks.
Yes. Partners can own a feature or system end to end, or support a team led by the lead studio. The important thing is that ownership is agreed and written down before work starts.