Case Study: Obsidian Entertainment Speeds Game Builds and QA with Incredibuild

Legendary gaming studio Obsidian saves over 2,500 monthly developer and QA hours by using IncrediBuild for both Windows and Linux environments

Obsidian Entertainment, the game studio behind major titles like Star Wars, South Park, Fallout, and Armored Warfare, needed to speed up its development workflow for a massive MMO with millions of lines of code. Its mixed Windows and Linux environment, along with demanding QA requirements and long compile times, made faster builds essential. Incredibuild was used to help address these build and iteration bottlenecks.

By implementing Incredibuild, Obsidian Entertainment dramatically reduced compile and daily build times across both Windows and Linux. On the client side, compile times dropped from about 40 minutes to 5–10 minutes; Windows daily builds saved more than 1.5 hours; and Linux server compile times improved from 1 hour 45 minutes to around 30 minutes. Incredibuild also helped save an estimated 20–30 QA man-hours per day, with Javier Olivares noting the team could be saving nearly 100 man-hours per day per programmer on Visual Studio builds.

Obsidian Entertainment

Javier Olivares

Lead Programmer