Fuse Games' 75-Person Core Team Model Behind Star Wars: Galactic Racer

A core team of 75 at Fuse Games shipped Star Wars: Galactic Racer with roughly 1,100 professional roles listed in its credits, CEO Matt Webster told GamesIndustry.biz, using a four-tier distributed development model he broke down in unusual detail.

The game is performing commercially: Webster told VGC that sales are "healthy," and the title regularly reaches 18,000 concurrent users on Steam with a "mostly positive" rating. Hard sales figures have not been published. For studios weighing how to structure distributed production, the interview offers a concrete taxonomy rather than a press-release abstraction.

How does Fuse Games divide the labor?

Webster split the model into four categories: the core studio, co-development partners, external development partners, and outsourcing partners. Each tier carries a distinct level of integration into the day-to-day production process.

• Outsourcing partners sit furthest from Fuse Games. They deliver specific assets against a brief, in limited interactions with clear deliverables.
• External development partners own defined sections of the game, built outside the company and then integrated.
• Co-development partners function as an extension of the internal team, despite working for another company.
• The core studio anchors the whole structure at approximately 75 people.

The takeaway: Fuse Games treats "distributed development" as a tiered supply chain, not a single outsourcing category.

What does each tier look like in practice?

"You give a brief, you get an output back, and you integrate it in," Webster said of outsourcers. "Which sounds transactional, but you shouldn't treat it as transactional. It's very important that you build relationships with those folks, you get a better result when you do so."

External development, as Webster defined it, differs from co-development: specific sections of the game are assigned to outside teams. Galactic Racer's photo mode was produced this way, built externally and "slotted in" thanks to the use of Unreal Engine.

"It's clear to brief, clear to point to a set of features, and you need a cross-discipline team to bring it together, so you need production, art, UI, and code to create that thing," he said of features handed to external developers.

Co-developers operate at the deepest level of integration. They join stand-ups, contribute to Slack channels, and act as part of the main development team.

The takeaway: the closer a partner sits to the core, the more they participate in internal communication and decision-making.

Why does the terminology matter?

Webster's distinction addresses a real ambiguity in industry usage. "Co-development" and "external development" are frequently used interchangeably, including in trade coverage, which muddies conversations about scope, budgeting, and credit. A shared vocabulary lets studios scope contracts, plan integration milestones, and allocate production discipline accordingly.

The framework also lands at a moment when double-A and triple-A studios are searching for sustainable models that marshal hundreds of contributors without inflating headcount at a single site. The credits discrepancy, 75 core staff against roughly 1,100 credited roles, quantifies exactly how much labor such a model draws from outside the studio walls.

That same gap raises the open question Webster's model does not answer: how the industry credits distributed contributors fairly while recognizing the core studio's leadership.

Watch whether other mid-sized studios adopt Fuse Games' explicit four-tier terminology as sales data for Galactic Racer hardens in the coming quarters.