Why We Built USourceControl

If you run a game studio today, your choice of source control is a dismal little menu. Git, the default in almost every software industry, falls over the moment you throw 200 GB of binary assets at it. Git LFS patches that with pointer files and bandwidth packs, but the patch is fragile and expensive at game scale. Perforce, the AAA default for two decades, is a powerful tool buried under servers, seat licenses, and admin overhead. Everything else — Dropbox, cloud storage, ad-hoc "zip it and email it" — has no meaningful versioning at all.

We started USourceControl because that menu was our menu too, and we were tired of it.

The requirements are specific. You need to version files in the hundreds of megabytes — sometimes gigabytes — without tears. You need a sensible way for two artists to avoid stomping each other's work on a binary .uasset. You need an app that your non-engineer teammates can actually use. You need distributed teams to pull at reasonable speed from anywhere on the planet. And you need your whole setup not to require a full-time DevOps admin.

Plenty of tools do one or two of those things. Very few do all of them, and none of the ones that do are priced for a six-person indie studio.

USourceControl is a cloud source control service with a desktop app, aimed at game development studios. The product shape:

• Native large-file storage. Up to 10 GB per file, no pointer layer, no LFS bandwidth packs. The file you commit is the file stored.
• Server-authoritative file locking. First-class workflow in the desktop app. Lock a scene, edit, commit, release — all one button each.
• Cloud-first, no servers to run.We handle storage, bandwidth, backups, and uptime. You don't need an admin.
• A desktop app for every role. Artists, designers, engineers, and producers all use the same clean app. No P4V, no Git CLI, no LFS pointer confusion.
• Flat per-user pricing. Storage and bandwidth bundled. Free solo tier. No surprise packs.
• Open-source desktop client. MIT licensed. You can read the source and verify exactly how your data is handled.

For a fuller feature rundown and the head-to-head comparisons, the main site covers it in depth. This post is about why these choices — not a sales pitch.

Three principles shape every decision we make:

Never lose work, ever.Source control has one real job. When there's a trade-off between reliability and clever engineering, reliability wins. That's why we chose full file snapshots over binary diffs — diffs are elegant but brittle; snapshots are boring and bulletproof. It's why we have server-authoritative locking instead of client-side coordination. It's why every file is SHA-256 verified on upload and download.

Usable by non-engineers.Too many tools treat non-engineer adoption as an afterthought. We inverted that — the default experience is the desktop app, and the CLI is optional. If your texture artist can't commit confidently on day one, we've failed.

Fully managed, honestly priced.You shouldn't have to run a Perforce server to get Perforce features. And you shouldn't have to decode a bandwidth pack pricing page to predict your monthly bill. Our pricing is flat per-user and includes everything.

We're heads-down on the core experience — faster sync, smarter exclusions per engine, tighter locking UX, better audit logs. The roadmap is shaped by what our users tell us is in the way of shipping their games. If that's something you care about, the best thing you can do is try it on a real project and tell us what's broken.

You can start on the free solo tier today — 50 GB of storage, unlimited commits, no credit card. Or read our Unreal Engine setup guide or Perforce migration guide if you want to see the concrete workflow before signing up.

Thanks for reading. We're building the source control we wanted for our own game projects, and we're very glad it's useful for yours too.