Streamline's Alexander Fernandez

It's been an interesting six months. Ultimately, if you look at your macro- and micro-economics we always new the bubble would pop - in December, when it started going to Hell, we started to make our preparations.

Now, ever-optimistic, and a little bit of the realist I am, we started to prepare for what we thought would be a potential letting of the blood. So what we found was that it was a mixed bag - what ended up happening was that publishers stopped commissioning projects that was the hardest part.

Because essentially what you then see is a lack of commissioned projects trickle to the developers, which then trickled to the outsourcers, so it forced us to reassess and reconfigure ourselves.

What ended up happening was one side of positive, one side of negative. We started to look at different opportunities to continue our line of business and get into other sectors. Effectively what happened with Streamline is that we started pushing on things that we never thought would be in our domain.

It doesn't mean that it's been easy, because I don't think that anyone can say it's been an easy six months, and this whole thing will start to lead into the Fall, but what it's done in our case is push the entire concept of co-production to the forefront. We've been very fortunate in that our co-productions have kept going - we're coming to a situation where the sacrifices of the past six months are leading to rewards.

I can't give you all the details on that, but what I can say is that there isn't an industry that hasn't been hit by this, and more importantly there isn't a sector within our industry that hasn't felt it. I think the most important thing now is that we re-evaluate the fact that some of the things the industry was doing was unsustainable. If you look at it, there have to be better ways to finance games, there have to be better ways to put productions together, and there has to be something smarter.

Ultimately I think that's what this has exposed, and we're going to see change. Some of the publishers are now looking towards things like completion bonding and informal investors - gone are the days of the credit card piggy bank, where financial stability would sometimes lead to the ability to finance projects with absolute impunity.

You'll see productions happen in a different way - which is also positive for developers, because there will be more situations where they'll, if not demand more, be in a position from the get-go where they're seen more as partners that are here to help make a product.

If we're talking about what's going on in 2010, what we're going to see is because we've staggered development out the way we have in the next year, I think we'll end up creating a new trend in the industry that's a realisation it's not all about Christmas, it's about titles throughout the year.

That's not a bad thing - if you think about it, being able to sell commercial product throughout the year and still be successful is a lot better than being on Murderer's Row, or whatever the Hell you call it.