Moving is a challenging task on its own, but moving a production studio without major disruptions is another beast altogether. I have planned and executed a full studio migration a couple times now.
This is the story of when I moved an active mobile production studio from one end of Abu Dhabi to the other. I designed the network, coordinated the contractors and kept production running through all of it.
The Setup
In late 2021, an active mobile production studio in Abu Dhabi began planning a move from Park Rotana Complex in Khalifa Park to the newly constructed Yas Creative Hub on Yas Island.
By the time IT was brought into the planning process, the broad decisions had already been made. The timeline existed. The building was signed. What remained was the execution, and the question of how to move a live production environment across the city with a weekend of maximum downtime.
I had one person on my team. That person was me.
The planning phase ran from November 2021 to March 2022. Physical execution began in March and concluded with the studio officially opening in October 2022. In between those two dates lived approximately eleven months of contractor negotiations, municipal certifications, regulatory checks, ISP transitions, and the specific kind of creative problem-solving that only emerges when something has gone genuinely wrong.
What follows are the lessons I took out of that process. Each one is the product of something not going according to plan.
Lesson 1: Contractors Will Interpret Your Plans Creatively
The Townhall area was one of the centrepiece spaces in the new studio. Staircase-style tiered seating, designed to hold the full studio for all-hands presentations and company-wide events. Significant square footage. Significant investment.
At some point during construction, the contractor expanded the footprint of the Townhall seating into the adjacent office space.
This was not in the drawings. This was not discussed. This was a unilateral creative decision made by someone who either misread the plans or chose not to read them at all.
The options at that point were: tear down the built staircase structure and rebuild within the correct boundaries, or reduce the Townhall seating to fit the original allocation and accept the smaller configuration.
Tearing down the staircase would have added weeks to the timeline and reopened a cost conversation nobody wanted to have. I made the call to reduce the seating and move on.
Key Lesson: Treat every contractor deliverable as a draft until you have physically walked it. Do not assume that architectural drawings translate into accurate builds without supervision. The gap between what is planned and what is built is the gap you do not check on.
Lesson 2: "That's Normal" Is Not a Technical Answer
The Yas Creative Hub building was new. The HVAC systems were new. The air conditioning units for the studio floor were new.
When the AC units were tested, they leaked water.
All of them.
The contractor's position was that this was normal behaviour during initial testing. Condensation. Expected. Nothing to worry about.
I did not accept this.
Water leaking from ceiling-mounted AC units directly above workstations, server infrastructure, and production hardware is not a commissioning quirk. It is a liability. I pushed back, escalated, and held the sign-off until the units were inspected, the drainage systems corrected, and a dry test was completed.
The contractor was not happy about this. The contractor was also wrong.
Key Lesson: When a contractor tells you a failure mode is normal, ask them to put it in writing. The willingness to document tends to clarify the situation quickly. You are not an expert in HVAC engineering. You are an expert in what happens to your infrastructure when water falls on it.
Lesson 3: Certification Will Slip. Plan for It to Fail Three More Times.
The datacenter required fireproofing certification from the Abu Dhabi municipality before it could be approved for occupation. This is not optional. This is not a formality. Without it, the datacenter does not open.
The first inspection failed. The contractor had fireproofed the upper walls but not the lower portion where the raised floor began. The inspector identified the gap immediately.
The contractor returned, made corrections, and scheduled the second inspection.
The second inspection failed. Same issue, different section of wall.
By the third scheduled inspection, I attended in person. I walked the inspector through the space before the formal review. I had already identified and flagged the remaining gaps to the contractor the day prior. We tore down the wall completely, sealed the entirety from the ceiling all the way to the gaps in the raised floor that were flagged the previous times and then rebuilt it in a day.
Eleven months of planning. Three fireproofing inspections later, the datacenter was finally approved.
Key Lesson: Regulatory certification does not run on your project timeline. Build buffer into every sign-off that involves a third-party authority. Assume one failure at minimum. Assume two if the contractor has already demonstrated they are reading the requirements selectively. The municipality inspector is not your adversary, they are the only person in the room who has no reason to cut corners.
Lesson 4: Someone Has to Be in the Room
Network cabling for floor boxes sounds like an unattractive task. Route the cables, terminate the connections, test the links. Standard process.
The studio floor had clearly defined user desk areas. It also had collaboration zones, separate open spaces designed for informal meetings, breakout sessions, and team clusters away from the main desk rows.
The cabling team forgot about the collaboration zones entirely.
This was not discovered during the cabling phase. It was discovered when the floor was nearly complete and someone asked why the collaboration areas had no connectivity.
The answer was that nobody had been watching.
Separately, the meeting rooms, conference room, and Townhall all arrived with furniture below the specified quality. Table microphones and ceiling speakers were installed without acoustic testing. The first time a meeting was held with both active simultaneously, the room fed back on itself.
The soundproofing was inadequate. I had to require the contractor to return and correct the acoustic treatment before the rooms were signed off.
Neither of these failures were inevitable. Both would have been caught earlier with consistent on-site supervision.
Key Lesson: Delegation to a contractor is not the same as oversight. Also, expecting the contractor to read the plans carefully is a mistake on its own. For any build task that involves multiple phases or multiple teams, assign a human being, ideally yourself, to physically verify completion at each stage. The cabling team did not maliciously skip the collaboration zones. They were not reminded those zones existed.
Lesson 5: Build for Airflow Before You Build for Aesthetics
The build machines, the systems used for compiling and packaging the game builds, were racked in a dedicated enclosure. The rack was purpose-built for the space. Solid construction. Clean cable management. Doors on all sides.
The machines were fully sealed.
When I tested the systems with the doors closed, temperatures climbed immediately. The enclosure had no rear ventilation. Hot air had nowhere to go. Left unaddressed, the build machines would have begun throttling and eventually failing within weeks of production use.
The fix was not elegant. I instructed the team to cut the back panel off the enclosure to create airflow. A purpose-built rack, freshly installed in a new studio, was modified with a cutting tool before it ever went into use.
It worked. The temperatures normalized. Production was never impacted.
Key Lesson: Thermal management is not an afterthought. When specifying any enclosure, rack, or cabinet that will house active compute hardware, airflow path is a primary requirement, not a secondary consideration. A rack that looks correct but traps heat is worse than no rack at all. Ask where the hot air goes before you approve the build.
Lesson 6: WiFi is a People Problem, Not a Space Problem
The wireless network for the new studio was designed based on the floor plan. Access points were positioned to achieve even signal coverage across the studio area. The planning looked correct on paper.
When the studio opened, one team reported consistently poor wireless performance. The QA team.
QA teams in mobile game production operate with a high density of devices. Each tester runs multiple handsets simultaneously, sometimes four to six devices per person. A team of five QA testers represents potentially twenty-five to thirty active wireless devices in a single area.
The QA team had been seated in a corner of the studio. The AP coverage in that corner was designed for standard user density. It was not designed for the device density of a QA floor.
The fix required repositioning access points and adjusting the wireless design to reflect actual usage patterns. It was not a complicated fix. It was a fix that should not have been necessary if the seating plan was completed earlier on.
Key Lesson: Plan your wireless network after you have confirmed where every team is sitting and not before. Coverage maps measure signal strength across physical space. They do not account for the number of devices a given team will connect. Seat your highest-density teams first. Design the wireless network around them.
Lesson 7: When the Plan Fails, Build a Fallback
Building contract dates can be challenging to manage when there is a large scale migration like a studio move happening. But these are the kind of scenarios that you should include buffers and fallback plans for.
The contract with the Park Rotana building ended in August 2022. The original agreement with the contractor was that the new studio would be ready by then. It was not.
Electrical approvals had not completed. The site safety inspection had failed. The physical move approval was delayed until a full cleanup could be completed, estimated at end of September at the earliest. The old building contract was expiring. The new building could not legally be occupied.
There was a gap. A real one.
I had an internal discussion with the Yas Creative Hub facilities team and confirmed one thing: moving equipment in for installation and testing purposes was permitted. The building did not need an occupancy permit for machines. Only for people.
That was enough.
I formulated a plan around that single fact. The ISP line was installed and activated in the new building. I made the decision to break the firewall high-availability pair and move one unit to Yas Creative Hub, making it the primary. The network was built out and tested. Then on a single weekend, I shut down the datacenter at Park Rotana, moved the servers and build machines to the new site, and brought the full environment back up, accessible over VPN.
The HA pair was reconstructed. The build pipeline came online. On the last week of August, the studio went fully remote.
For six weeks, an active mobile game production studio operated entirely over VPN from a datacenter that sat inside a building nobody was allowed to enter yet. Production continued without disruption. No milestones missed. No pipeline failures.
When the second safety inspection passed and the occupancy permit was issued in mid-October, the studio opened. The physical move for employees was the final step, a natural transition from working remotely to coming to a brand new studio.
Key Lesson: When the original plan becomes impossible, the question is not how to restore it. Rather, think about what new plan can be made with the new constraints. The building facilities conversation was not a workaround, it was a requirements discovery session. Understanding the exact boundary of what was permitted revealed a path that the original plan had never considered.
The initial plan failed. The migration and the timeline did not.
Commonalities and Uncommon Paths
Reading these back, there is a common thread across the first six lessons that I did not fully understand until I was well past the project.
Every one of these six challenges was a visibility failure.
The contractor expanded into the wrong space because nobody caught it early. The AC units leaked because I was expected to take someone's word for it. The fireproofing failed twice because I was not in the room. The collaboration zones had no cabling because nobody was watching. The rack had no airflow because aesthetics were evaluated and thermals were not. The WiFi was weak in the QA corner because people density was never part of the wireless planning conversation.
The lessons here were earned, not studied.
Handling situations like the seventh however, requires an understanding of the situation beyond what the defined IT jurisdictions are. If I had simply worked with what IT Infrastructure teams were supposed to work within, I would not have thought of a Hail Mary such as moving a portion of the equipment over even though there was no entry permit to the new building.
A studio migration is not an infrastructure project with a construction component. It is a coordination problem that happens to involve infrastructure. Contractors, inspectors, furniture vendors, ISPs, and municipality authorities are all operating on their own timelines, with their own definitions of done.
Your definition of done is the one that matters. The only way to enforce it is to be present, to verify directly, and to treat every sign-off as provisional until you have seen it yourself.
Checklists are great to have. Structured plans are amazing to create. Without expecting failures and planning buffers in the project however, you invite chaos.
I had no predecessor to learn from. No internal playbook. No one who had done this before and left notes.
This is me leaving the notes.
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