How to Succeed in Co-Development Clip #1

GDC Festival of Gaming has posted a new GDC Side Quest clip featuring Sam Carlisle, co-founder of XDS Spark, where he breaks down the difference between outsourcing and co-development. The framing is useful for teams that rely on external partners, because the two models can look similar on paper while creating very different expectations around ownership, communication, and day-to-day production.

For developers, the key takeaway is that co-development is less about handing off isolated work and more about folding an external team into the project structure. That usually means closer collaboration with internal leads, clearer technical and creative alignment, and more responsibility on both sides to keep pipelines, milestones, and quality targets in sync.

The clip is part of a broader GDC Side Quest episode on succeeding in co-development, which makes it relevant to producers, business leads, and anyone managing scope across multiple teams. Even without a full breakdown of the interview here, the topic is timely for studios trying to scale without losing control of vision or production cadence.

If your team has worked with external partners, the practical question is where you draw the line between vendor support and true co-dev, and how that choice changes staffing, integration overhead, and risk.