Vertical ownership of one UE5 multiplayer system. Six months. Senior staffing. Fixed price.
Five engineers. One vertical. Owned end-to-end — replication, GAS, animation pipeline, dedicated server, or a system you name. Senior-led, embedded in your Perforce, accountable to your producers. The middle path between hiring senior FTEs you can't find and an outsourced T&M team you can't trust to ship.
WHAT A
POD IS
A senior-led, fixed-composition team that takes ownership of one vertical system.
A Pod is a senior-led, fixed-composition team that takes ownership of one vertical system in your UE5 multiplayer build for six months minimum, embedded inside your pipeline and accountable to your production org.
The composition is fixed — you don't get a rotating cast. The vertical is single — we own one system, end-to-end, not a portfolio of small tasks. The pricing is fixed — you can put the number in your forecast on Day 1.
This is not body-shopping. This is a senior team that has shipped the same kind of system before, embedded into your project to ship the same kind of system again.
Five engineers. Fixed cast.
| Role | Count | What they do |
|---|---|---|
| Lead engineer / architect | 1 | Owns the vertical end-to-end. Single point of accountability. Senior architect tier. |
| Senior engineer | 2 | Senior-tier ICs, deep in the vertical. Not generalists rotated in. |
| Mid engineer | 2 | Mid-tier ICs ramped on the vertical. Production output, not hand-holding. |
Five engineers. ~22 person-days × 5 = 110 person-days/month. Blended day rate ~€420/day. Six-month engagement = ~€260,000–€330,000 depending on lead/senior tier mix.
Heavy tier adds a Lead Designer or Lead Tech Artist for cross-cutting work and one additional senior; pricing ~€450,000–€600,000 for six months.
The differences that matter.
A “team augmentation contract”
Augmentation is body-shopping with a different sales pitch. Augmentation rents you a chair; a Pod owns a system. The accountability shape is fundamentally different.
An “outsourced delivery”
Outsourced delivery happens at arm's length, behind a single project manager, with senior reviewers seen quarterly. A Pod is embedded in your Perforce, attending your standups, committing under your brand. The seniority and the embedding are the product.
A “T&M co-dev engagement”
T&M creates incentive misalignment — the more hours, the more revenue. Pod fixed-pricing aligns the engagement with shipping the vertical. We make money when we're efficient; you don't pay for our inefficiency.
HOW A
POD STARTS
The clean path: Audit → Pod handshake.
- Four-week Architecture Audit (/ue5-architecture-audit/) — fixed-fee €30k–€60k. Audit surfaces the highest-priority remediation work. Pod-sized engagement spec drafted in parallel during week 3 of the audit.
- Pod kickoff — the audit fee credits in full against the first month of the Pod (if the Pod starts within 90 days of audit delivery). Senior team is staffed against the locked vertical scope.
- Pod execution — six-month engagement, monthly invoiced at fixed price, delivered against the audit's Pod-sized engagement spec.
The direct path: Pod without Audit.
If you already know the vertical you want owned and have the architecture clarity to scope it, we'll skip the audit. Discovery call (90 min) → engagement charter draft → mutual NDA → vertical scope locked → Pod kickoff. Standard timeline: 3 weeks from first call to engineers in your Perforce. Direct-path Pod pricing is the same as audit-credit-applied Pod pricing — you don't pay a premium for skipping the audit.
VERTICAL
SCOPES
Three vertical-ownership case scopes — drawn from systems we built on ATONE.
Yours will be different — but the shape of the engagement is what these examples are showing.
Take ownership of the replication and netcode stack for a UE5 multiplayer project targeting 50+ CCU per layer. Six-month vertical includes:
- IRIS adoption / migration plan execution (or Replication Graph hardening if IRIS is not a fit)
- Authority-model decision per system (server-auth vs. client-auth-with-rollback) and implementation
- Replication frequency tuning, dormancy, relevancy
- Bandwidth profile down by 30%+ from baseline
- Hit registration latency budget locked under the project's target
Take ownership of the GAS extension surface for a UE5 action-combat project where GAS-native primitives don't quite cover Souls-tier combat fidelity. Six-month vertical includes:
- GAS extension boundary design — what stays GAS-native, what gets custom
- Predictor design for asymmetric-latency combat
- AI tick batching layered on top of GAS to keep GAS-tick off the bottleneck path
- Authoring-ergonomics review — your design team stays productive in GAS
Take ownership of the character animation pipeline for a UE5 multiplayer project where peak-density CPU anim-tick is a known bottleneck. Six-month vertical includes:
- Animation system architecture review and instrumentation
- Compute-shader pose evaluation system stand-up (where the math justifies it)
- Per-mesh-type batched skinning dispatch
- LOD strategy aligned with Nanite environment bands
- Documented authoring workflow your animation team adopts as default
Other verticals we've shipped at depth: custom dedicated-server architecture; persistent permissioned semantic POI systems; blendshape-based hand animation across weapon types; AI tick batching for GAS density; movement system extension (Mover migration). Bring us the vertical you're stuck on; we'll tell you whether it's a Pod fit and scope it accordingly.
Fixed, not T&M. You can put the number in your forecast on Day 1.
1L + 2S + 2M, six months
€260,000 – €330,000 depending on lead and senior tier mix. Standard pricing assumes Lead at the lower-mid Lead band and Seniors at mid-Senior band; Senior-Architect-tier Lead and senior-Senior-tier ICs price at the upper end of the range.
1L + 3S + 3M + 1 Lead Discipline, six months
€450,000 – €600,000. Adds a cross-cutting discipline lead (Lead Designer or Lead Tech Artist) and one additional senior IC. Pricing reflects the additional Lead-tier headcount.
Discounted on commitment
Two parallel Pods (different verticals, same client) → 5% discount on the second Pod. 12-month committed engagement → 5–10% discount on the second six months. 24-month commitment → quote per engagement.
Hours are not billed. Scope is not creeping. Reporting is monthly milestone-attestation, not timesheets. If something genuinely changes, scope is renegotiated — but you don't pay for “extra hours” inside a fixed-scope month.
THE TEAM
Pod staffing is locked at engagement start. The named lead is the lead who delivers the vertical.
A Pod is staffed from the ~60-person senior-heavy bench at GS Studio™ — engineers and discipline leads selected against the vertical. Default named leads:
- Replication / netcode / dedicated-server Pod lead: Max Makarenko, CTO. Prior pedigree: Crytek, EPAM Systems, Dragons Lake.
- GAS / combat / movement Pod lead: Senior gameplay engineer who shipped Souls-tier combat in ATONE.
- Animation pipeline & performance Pod lead: Lukman Shih, Technical Animation Director — author of the ATONE GPU-anim system.
- World Partition / Nanite / Lumen / level-streaming Pod lead: Serhii Lisetskyi, Lead Tech Artist — GSC Game World pedigree (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. studio).
- Production / creative-systems Pod lead: Maksim Timakov, Game Director — ex-Plarium, ex-Lesta, ex-Pride Games.
The named lead and the named seniors in your engagement charter are the named lead and named seniors who deliver the vertical. No bait-and-switch.
The questions we get asked.
"Why six months minimum?"
"Can we extend into a 12-month engagement?"
"Can the Pod be remote-only or do we need on-site?"
"What if the vertical we picked turns out wrong?"
"Who owns the work product?"
"Can the Pod ship under our brand?"
"What's the smallest project where a Pod makes sense?"
Tell us the vertical you want owned.
Tell us the vertical and the timeline. We'll come back with a Pod composition, a six-month price, a named lead candidate, and a calendar — within five business days.
Book the call→