The UK co-development company, also known as The Unreal Guys, has assembled a team made up entirely of performance engineers and technical artists. The unit will work across Unreal Engine, Unity and proprietary game technology, embedding its specialists directly within clients’ engineering, art and design teams.
The division is designed to address optimisation throughout production rather than treating it as a final compliance exercise shortly before release. Its engineers will identify processing bottlenecks, reduce memory use, improve frame rates and tackle runtime stuttering while projects are still being developed.
CodeDev said the approach would allow studios to make substantial technical changes before production schedules become constrained. Performance problems discovered late can require difficult compromises, including reductions in visual quality, fewer on-screen characters, changes to level design or delays while developers rewrite systems.
The Performance Guys has already contributed to projects involving Epic Games, Hangar 13 and OtherSide Entertainment. Its work has included support for Hangar 13’s Mafia: The Old Country and OtherSide Entertainment’s multiplayer stealth title Thick as Thieves, alongside unannounced triple-A productions.
On one multiplatform project, the team reduced memory consumption by as much as 50 per cent, helping the title comply with platform limits without removing planned functionality. The company has not identified the project or disclosed the original memory footprint.
Modern games must operate across increasingly varied hardware configurations, including high-end computers, consoles with fixed specifications, portable devices and cloud-based services. Developers must balance visual fidelity with stable frame delivery, loading speeds, thermal limits and memory availability.
Those demands have increased as studios adopt larger game worlds, detailed lighting systems, high-resolution assets and complex simulation tools. Features can work correctly during development yet struggle once they are combined in complete levels or tested under real gameplay conditions.
The Performance Guys will focus on problems that directly affect shipping targets rather than producing diagnostic reports for other teams to implement. Its engineers are expected to enter project builds, analyse hardware behaviour and make changes within the engine and production pipeline.
The service covers independent, AA and triple-A games, as well as virtual production and high-end visualisation projects. CodeDev operates on a time-and-materials basis and can supply specialists as an extension of an internal development team or take responsibility for defined areas of work.
Chief executive Myke Parrott said demand for dedicated optimisation assistance had grown as partner studios encountered problems that required specialised engine knowledge. He said performance work was often postponed until teams were already facing heavy production pressure.
The new unit is backed by CodeDev Group’s existing operational structure. The leadership team includes Parrott, chairman Rik Alexander and chief operating officer Andy Norman. The company’s co-development business was established in 2024 to provide scalable teams for Unreal Engine projects and has operated through a remote-friendly model.
CodeDev’s expansion reflects broader changes in game production, where publishers and developers increasingly use external specialists for engineering, art, testing and platform support. Co-development companies can provide technical capacity during demanding production phases without requiring studios to maintain every specialist role permanently.
Optimisation expertise is particularly difficult to scale because the work requires knowledge of software architecture, rendering, content creation and target hardware. A performance problem may originate in code, but it can also arise from lighting, animation, textures, artificial intelligence systems or the way assets are loaded.
The company is recruiting senior engineers with optimisation experience from independent, AA or triple-A development. Although the division is based in the UK, positions are open under its remote-friendly working model.
Applicants are expected to be capable of diagnosing complex engine behaviour and working inside existing production teams. CodeDev has not specified the number of roles being created or provided financial details for the expansion.
The division enters the market as developers face continued pressure to release games across several platforms while maintaining stable performance. High-profile launches affected by frame-rate drops, shader compilation stutter and memory limitations have made technical quality an increasingly prominent concern for players, platform operators and publishers.
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