Build, Borrow, or Buy? Choosing Your Game Studio's CI/CD Infrastructure
When building out your CI/CD and build infrastructure — whether at a game studio or any large software organization — you'll face a fundamental strategic question early on: do you build it yourself, adopt free open-source tools, or purchase a commercial solution?
In practice, most studios end up with a mix of all three. But understanding the tradeoffs of each approach is essential before committing to any of them, especially since changing course mid-production is costly and disruptive.
Build: Rolling Your Own
Building from scratch means your team designs and develops the system internally, using only foundational components. This approach is most common in studios working with a proprietary in-house engine, where deep integration with internal tooling feels like a natural fit.
When it makes sense: Your requirements are so unusual, or your engine so custom, that no off-the-shelf tool comes close to fitting. You have dedicated headcount to own the system long-term.
Where it breaks down: The "free" label is misleading. What you're really doing is redirecting engineering capacity away from making games. Engine developers who could contribute are almost always too busy building the engine itself. The team members assigned to the build system are perpetually context-switching. And the institutional knowledge problem is real — these systems often produce a single internal expert, and when they leave, the organization is left with a critical dependency and no documentation.
The clearest signal that a studio has over-invested in the Build approach is a build system that works, but that nobody outside of one or two people can modify or debug.
Borrow: Open Source as a Foundation
The Borrow approach means you're still building the system yourself, but you're assembling it from open-source components rather than writing everything from scratch. Jenkins, GitLab CI, and similar tools fall into this category — mature, widely used, freely available, and extensively documented.
This is the approach that offers the most flexibility while keeping costs low, and for many studios it's the right long-term foundation.
The knowledge advantage is underrated. When you hire an engineer who already knows Jenkins, they're productive immediately. When you need to debug a configuration problem at 2am the week before ship, there's a good chance someone on Stack Overflow or GitHub has hit the same wall. That breadth of community support is genuinely difficult to replicate with proprietary tools.
A real example: During development of a Need for Speed title using EA's Frostbite engine, the challenge came to migrate Criterion's internal build system to Jenkins — the same platform the rest of EA's Development and Release Engineering organization was already using. With prior Jenkins experience from Nokia, the migration was completed in a week, running both systems in parallel so the Criterion leads could verify parity before cutting over. The old system was switched off at the end of the following week. Speed of transition like that is only possible when the tool has a learning curve most engineers have already climbed.
Where Borrow creates problems:
- Corporate security approval can be a genuine blocker, especially when there's no vendor relationship and no commercial support contract.
- You're responsible for the integration work — and no two studio environments are identical. Connecting your CI system to your VCS, your asset pipeline, your certification workflows, and your analytics takes real effort.
- The plugin ecosystem is enormous and tempting. Focus on solving the problem in front of you first; avoid adding tools just because others use them.
- Forking open-source components to add custom behavior is a trap. At EA, a Jenkins plugin was forked to add internal reporting features rather than building a separate plugin. Over time, upstream updates couldn't be cleanly adopted because they conflicted with the forked changes. Add new things. Don't bend existing ones.
Buy: Commercial Software and Support Contracts
Buying means acquiring a product — usually with a support agreement — that requires minimal custom development to get running. The core value proposition is time-to-value and access to vendor expertise.
Support contracts are the real product. When your build farm is down the week of a milestone drop, having a direct line to an account manager who can escalate immediately is worth a significant portion of the annual contract price on its own. Generic open-source tools offer no such escalation path.
Commercial tools often come bundled with adjacent features — monitoring, analytics, compliance tooling — that you wouldn't have built yourself but end up relying on. Certification programs for your team members are also a meaningful benefit: they increase individual capability while signaling organizational investment in the team's development.
The renewal risk is structural. This is the most important consideration with commercial software, and it's easy to underestimate at signing. A two-year enterprise agreement feels stable. But vendor economics change. At EA, a widely-used internal workflow system moved to enterprise licensing under favorable initial terms. When the contract came up for renewal, the vendor's pricing increased by 300–400%. Teams evaluated what they'd actually be giving up by returning to the free open-source version and concluded the answer was: not much. Three weeks before Christmas, teams across multiple studios migrated production game builds from the enterprise platform to its open-source equivalent — within two weeks, across a holiday shutdown. It worked, because the underlying open-source tool was mature and the teams understood it. But the situation should never have gotten that close.
Before signing, ask:
- What happens at renewal? Does the contract include pricing protections?
- Is there a genuine trial period that mirrors your production workflows, not just a demo environment?
- What is the realistic migration cost if you need to leave? Treat this as a live question, not a hypothetical.
Practical Decision Framework
There's no universally correct answer, but a few principles hold across most situations:
Prefer Borrow as your default. Open-source tools with strong community adoption give you flexibility, a talent pool that understands the technology, and the ability to change course relatively quickly. This is the approach that tends to age best.
Buy when support is the actual product. If your team lacks the bandwidth to troubleshoot infrastructure problems, or your release schedule makes downtime genuinely catastrophic, a commercial support contract may be worth its cost many times over.
Build only when you have no other option — and staff it properly. If you choose to build, treat it like a product, not a side project. It needs dedicated ownership, documentation, and succession planning. The biggest failure mode isn't technical; it's organizational.
The "free" label obscures the real cost. Whether you build (redirected engineering time) or borrow (integration and maintenance overhead) or buy (contract, lock-in, renewal risk), every option has a cost structure. Model them honestly before committing.
Whatever you choose, fund it. The most common infrastructure failure mode isn't a bad technology decision — it's underfunding and understaffing the system once it's in place. Build infrastructure is not a solved problem you can hand to someone part-time. It requires attention, iteration, and people who own it.
This framework applies broadly to any build distribution or CI/CD tooling decision, but it's especially relevant in game development, where build sizes, console certification requirements, and co-development workflows create constraints that most general-purpose tools weren't designed around.
