Game Studios Are Moving Beyond Legacy Version Control, and Here's Why
Diversion is positioning itself as a scalable, modern alternative to legacy version control options like Perforce and Git for teams working with Unreal, Unity, large files, and creative pipelines
For years, version control was something many game teams only thought about when it broke.
A designer overwrites a Blueprint. An artist loses work on a shared scene. A contractor waits hours for a project to sync. A build pipeline slows down because the repository has become too large to move at the pace of production. These are not rare edge cases anymore. For many studios, they have become part of the daily friction of making modern games.
That friction is one reason more game teams are starting to question the tools sitting underneath their production pipeline. Git remains the default in much of software development. Perforce remains deeply embedded in large-scale game production. But as teams become more distributed, projects become heavier, production budgets come under more pressure, and creative workflows become more complex, both systems are being pushed into territory they were not originally built to handle. For studios trying to scale without adding more infrastructure, maintenance, and licensing overhead, the question is no longer only whether their version control works. It is whether it still makes sense for the way they produce games today.
Diversion is building around that shift.
The company describes its platform as scalable version control for game development, Unreal Engine, Unity, 3D, and AI workflows. In practice, its argument is simple: game studios should not have to choose between a code-first tool that struggles with large binary assets and a legacy enterprise system that can handle scale but often comes with operational overhead.
Traditional version control began as an engineering solution. Code was the primary asset, files were relatively small, and merging text-based changes was a manageable part of the workflow. Game production complicates that model. A modern project can include code, 3D models, textures, animations, audio files, maps, Blueprints, Unity Prefabs, configuration data, and large binary assets that cannot be merged like source code.
“Version control in game development is not just about code. A typical project has code, 3D models, textures, audio, animations, level files, configuration, and engine-specific assets like Blueprints or Unity Prefabs. These files are often large, binary, and worked on by people who are not engineers.
The challenge is that most version control tools were designed for source code. Git assumes small text files, technically proficient users, and workflows where merging is straightforward. Game projects break all of those assumptions.
Perforce handles game projects better, but it is expensive to deploy and operate, requires constant maintenance, and constrains modern workflows such as branching and integration with modern development tools.”
- Sasha Medvedovsky, Co-Founder & CEO of Diversion, in an interview with 80 Level
That distinction matters because version control is no longer just an engineering concern. Engineers, artists, designers, audio teams, producers, and external partners all need to work inside the same production environment. When a version control system only feels natural to programmers, the rest of the team often works around it. And those workarounds can become risky.
Git is strongest when dealing with text files, distributed engineering workflows, and changes that can be merged cleanly. Game projects often involve hundreds of thousands of files, many of them large and binary. Even with Git LFS, repositories can become slower and more complex as projects grow.
Perforce, meanwhile, has long been a staple for large game productions because it can handle big files and locking workflows more effectively. But it comes with a different kind of cost: infrastructure, server management, IT support, licensing, maintenance, and internal expertise. For some teams, that is manageable. For others, it becomes another production burden.
Diversion’s bet is that the next generation of studios wants something different: the scale and file-locking discipline associated with enterprise version control, but with a workflow that feels closer to the way modern teams actually build.
The platform is already being used across tens of thousands of projects, with hundreds of commercial studios and thousands of indie game developers working on Diversion. Beyond games, its customer base also includes virtual production studios, architectural visualization teams, VR and 3D companies, and AI startups.
One of those customers is Creatures Inc., which uses Diversion as part of its development workflow.
"Diversion is a version control system that builds upon the strengths of Git and Perforce, delivering robust functionality and security optimized for modern distributed development. Its branching capabilities provide us with the flexibility to test ideas and work in parallel without adding overhead to our production pipeline.
We highly value the Diversion team’s exceptional responsiveness and support in helping us streamline our workflows and build more efficiently."
- Oki Kotaro, General Manager and Senior Technical Director at Creatures Inc.
The large file problem is central to Diversion’s approach. The company says teams do not need to separate “large files” from “regular files,” configure LFS, or think about special tracking rules in the same way they would in a traditional Git-based workflow. In its benchmarks, Diversion says it can commit 400,000 files in under 30 seconds and clone a repository with 5 million files in under 5 minutes.
For game teams, numbers like these are not only technical claims. They point to a practical production issue: when syncing, cloning, or moving assets takes too long, people stop trusting the pipeline. Work starts happening outside the system. Files move through chat, drives, or manual exports. The more that happens, the more fragile production becomes.
Conflict prevention is another major part of Diversion’s positioning. In game development, many of the most important files cannot be merged cleanly. If two people change the same Blueprint, map, scene, or Prefab at the same time, one person’s work may be lost unless the team prevents the conflict before it happens.
Diversion tries to bring that prevention into the tools developers already use. The company offers native plugins for Unreal Engine and Unity, bringing version control directly into the editor. In Unreal, the plugin can alert users when someone else is already editing a file, both when the file is opened and when it is saved. For assets that should not be edited concurrently, Diversion also supports hard locks, giving one user exclusive write access until the lock is released.
For Blueprints specifically, Diversion integrates with Unreal Engine’s built-in visual merge tool, allowing conflicts to be resolved visually in the editor when they do occur. But the company’s broader philosophy is that prevention matters more than cleanup.
Diversion's Unreal Plugin
“Conflict prevention is one of the features we invested the most in, because for game development it’s critical. Most game assets are binary, and when two people edit the same one without knowing, someone loses their work.
Our main approach is preventing the conflict before it happens. When you open a file that someone else is already editing, you get an alert immediately, inside the editor. This works in both the Unreal Engine plugin and the Unity plugin. You see it when you open the file and when you try to save. For files that absolutely cannot have concurrent edits, we also support hard locks, where one person gets exclusive write access until they release it.”
- Sasha Medvedovsky, Co-Founder & CEO of Diversion, in an interview with 80 Level
Migration is also becoming a larger part of the conversation. Studios rarely replace version control overnight, especially when production is already underway. Diversion’s approach is to reduce the risk of that transition.
For teams coming from Perforce, the company supports bi-directional sync, allowing studios to keep Perforce and Diversion repositories in sync during the transition. That means teams can move gradually, project by project or department by department, instead of stopping production to switch systems all at once.
For teams coming from Git or GitHub, Diversion supports importing repositories with history, allowing teams to move existing projects into Diversion without starting from scratch.
That gradual approach matters because version control is deeply connected to the way a studio works. It touches source code, art, builds, permissions, reviews, automation, and external collaboration. A migration that interrupts production is often not realistic. A migration that lets teams test, import, sync, and transition in stages is more aligned with how studios actually operate.
The broader industry is now paying more attention to version control for large files. Epic Games recently announced Lore, an open-source version control system designed for large game and entertainment projects. In many ways, Lore validates the same problem Diversion has been focused on: Git and Perforce were not designed for every demand of modern game production.
Diversion’s view is that Lore is a positive signal for the industry, but not the same kind of product. Lore is an open-source version control engine that studios host and build around themselves. Epic’s own documentation describes Lore as a pre-stable 0.x release, with APIs and protocols that may still evolve before a stable 1.0 release. Epic also says it does not expect studios to replace existing tools overnight, and frames the current stage as a time for teams to explore, prototype, and help shape the project.
“Lore is a positive development for the industry. The fact that Epic is investing in a purpose-built VCS for large files validates what we’ve been saying for years: Git was not designed for this, and game teams deserve better tools. The more attention this problem gets, the better.
That said, Lore today is still pre-stable and not positioned as an overnight replacement for existing production tools. It gives teams a core version control engine, but much of what studios need around that engine — infrastructure, hosting, user management, CI/CD integrations, editor workflows, permissions, and production support — still needs to be built, integrated, or maintained.
Diversion is a fully managed service. You sign up and you’re working. There’s no server to deploy, no AWS backend to configure, and no infrastructure to scale as your team grows. And, we’re providing amazing, direct support to all our customers.”
- Sasha Medvedovsky, Co-Founder & CEO of Diversion, in an interview with 80 Level
Version control rarely gets treated as a creative tool. But in game development, it directly affects how safely and quickly teams can experiment. If artists are afraid to touch a shared map, if designers lose work on a Blueprint, if contractors wait all day for assets to sync, the production pipeline starts shaping the creative process in ways that are easy to underestimate.
That is the bigger story behind the shift. Studios are not only looking for faster syncs or better file locks. They are looking for version control that fits the reality of how games are made now: across disciplines, across locations, across engines, and across massive repositories filled with assets that do not behave like code.
Diversion’s bet is that more studios are ready to move past the old tradeoff between Git’s developer-first model and Perforce’s operational weight. Modern game teams need version control that understands production from the start — not just as a place to store code, but as the system that keeps creative work moving.
For teams curious to see how Diversion works in practice, it’s available to try for free through the Diversion website.
