Senior Outsourcing Producer on Metro Awakening: Eight Vendor Workstreams, 13,000+ Assets

Context

Metro Awakening is a AAA VR game, and a large part of it was made outside the studio. Eight outsourcing workstreams ran in parallel — 3D assets, performance capture, concept art, VFX, audio, localisation and UX/UI — and more than 13,000 technical and creative assets had to be delivered, checked and integrated into the build.

The job of the outsourcing producer is to make that many external teams behave like one pipeline: the right vendor, the right contract, predictable delivery and no surprises for the internal team.

My role

I was the Senior Outsourcing Producer. I owned vendor selection and contracts, the delivery pipelines and the quality and budget of everything that came from outside the studio.

What I did

• Vendor management. Selected and managed international agencies across all eight workstreams, and ran the day-to-day relationship, escalations and delivery milestones.
• Contracts and commercials. Negotiated MSAs and SOWs under strict confidentiality and IP frameworks, and agreed the commercial terms with each vendor.
• Pipeline optimisation. Tightened the delivery and review pipelines so that assets arrived in a state the internal team could integrate without rework.
• Budget control. Held the external budget against plan and found savings without lowering the technical bar.

Result

• External budget reduced by roughly 10% with no compromise on technical quality.
• 13,000+ assets across eight workstreams delivered into the game.
• Vendor relationships and delivery processes that held up through production.

Beyond the role: tools I built on my own initiative

Three recurring bottlenecks were slowing the production team down, and nobody had engineering time for them. This was not part of my job description, so I took it on myself and built the tools with AI coding assistants.

• Automated asset validation. Checks run automatically on about 13,000 assets per delivery, which cut manual review time by 95%.
• Confluence-to-PDF pipeline. Page-by-page export and PDF stitching for reports needed at least weekly, replacing about five hours of manual work per week.
• Integration tracking dashboard. A custom backend with a dashboard showing integration progress across all eight workstreams. The production team used the tools daily.