I have been down both roads, and the choice is rarely about quality, but about control. When we split our last project across separate vendors for art, code, and QA, we spent half our budget just on integration and managing the communication gaps between them. The code team blamed the art team for asset sizes, QA blamed everyone, and I became a full-time referee instead of a creative lead. That experience taught me that a unified pipeline usually wins unless you have a very strong internal producer who can handle that fragmentation. Full-service studios tend to have established workflows that prevent these silos, and when you
outsource game development through a single partner, you trade a bit of flexibility for a lot of sanity, provided they have verifiable experience with your specific engine and platform requirements.
