Embedded Artists for Your Studio
Senior game artists who integrate directly into your team, using your pipeline, attending your standups, shipping alongside you.
The Landscape
The Industry Is Changing Fast
Game studios face mounting pressure from every direction. The old playbook of hiring full-time or sending work over the wall to faceless vendors isn’t keeping up.
What Studios Need
What Studios Actually Need
Not another vendor. Not a body shop. A partner who understands game development from the inside, and takes the time to match on team chemistry, culture fit, skills, and genre experience.
“Studios don’t need another vendor. They need a partner who thinks like a studio.”
— The Horizons philosophyThe Problem
The Hire / Fire Cycle
Studios hire dozens of artists for production, then gut the team post-launch. Brilliant people lose their jobs. Institutional knowledge walks out the door. And next project? Start from scratch.
This cycle is destructive, for people, for quality, and for the bottom line.
The old way: Hire fast, fire faster. Institutional knowledge lost every cycle.
The Horizons Model
End the Cycle
With Horizons, your embedded team scales up for production peaks and scales down after launch, but nobody gets fired. Artists roll forward to the next project, or return to the Airship bench ready for your next call.
The Airship way: Scale with purpose. Nobody gets left behind.
Sound Familiar?
Other Outsourcers
Most outsourcing relationships are transactional. Work goes over the wall, comes back different from what you expected, and the cycle repeats. It’s not how we do things.
The Horizons Way
Not Outsourcing. Partnership.
Horizons artists are embedded in your team. They know your project, your culture, and your pipeline. They're part of your crew, not a vendor on the other end of an email.
How It Works
The Horizons Advantage
Embedded Integration
Your tools. Your standups. Your pipeline. Horizons artists don't work in a silo, they're in your Slack, your Jira, your dailies. They work to your Art Director's vision with our AD oversight built in.
Flexible Scaling
Ramp up for production peaks, scale down post-launch, with 30 days notice. VGEC eligible for UK studios, so your embedded team can contribute to tax relief claims.
Compliance & Care
We handle contracts, MSAs, insurance, employment law, tax, and HR with global reach. No pension, NI, or benefits on your books. Your team is looked after, you just get the talent.
We Handle
Global reach, so you can focus on making the game.
Case Study
PGA TOUR 2K25
2K Games and HB Studios needed to scale their art team rapidly for the PGA TOUR 2K franchise. Airship Horizons embedded 30+ artists across 3 consecutive releases.
Read the full case studyHow We Scaled
Front-Fill, Back-Fill, Flex
Rather than a fixed headcount, we used a front-filling and back-filling model, ramping artists in ahead of milestones and smoothly transitioning them as phases completed.
Results
Delivered. Every Time.
“Airship’s team felt like an extension of our own studio. They understood the franchise, the quality bar, and the pace we needed. We didn’t have to re-explain anything between titles.”
— Peter Jones, Senior Production Director, HB StudiosReady to Scale Your Team?
Tell us about your project and timeline. We’ll match you with artists who fit your culture, your pipeline, and your quality bar.