Shanghai-based outsourcing specialist Virtuos has acquired the core team from visual effects and animation studio Sparx, allowing the new subsidiary to reopen its Vietnam studios.

Sparx moved to new facilities in Shanghai last November, but the acquisition will allow the company to reopen its Saigon studios and expand back to its original size of over 200 animation professional by the end of 2012.

The team at Sparx has done animation work on a number of TV shows and movies, including Disney‘s Rolie Polie Olie, and Exodus‘ feature film Igor.

The news follows previous Virtuos acquisitions including Russian concept art studio Grafit and audio firm BSP. The company now comprises over 800 employees.

"Bringing together Virtuos‘ art production infrastructure with Sparx expertise in film-quality animation, cinematics and VFX, we will be able to offer a more fully integrated solution for all our clients,” Virtuos CEO Gilles Langourieux said in a statement.

While some in the industry are still wary of outsourcing their coding work to an outside company, Langourieux argued in a recent Gamasutra interview that developers are increasingly open to the practice.

"R&D outsourcing, code development outsourcing, is fairly new to the games industry but it‘s absolutely not new to the software industry in general," he said.

"So if it works for the general software outsourcing industry, there‘s absolutely no reason why it could not work for the games industry. It‘s just that the games industry is less mature from a development practice standpoint..."