Remedy's Matias Myllyrinne

There are various factors. I think small is a relative term. I think we're at 47 internal today, from seven different nationalities, so it's certainly a lot larger than it was a few years back. We want to have a fairly small tight team, we focus on the tools and stuff like that so we have a good production pipeline which allows us to be efficient so that we don't have to place every tree into this huge world, but we can actually have procedural tools that actually help us to do that. So it's about finding the working methods as well. And then also using a lot of outsourcing, and a lot of middleware solutions.

But it's also about focus - I think that primarily you should be happy focusing on the core of what makes your games cool. We think that Alan Wake is a fantastic thriller - it's a story-driven experience. No, we're not doing multiplayer, so you don't need to do everything. But if you do a few things that are really relevant to the audience, and maybe one or two things that are new, then I think that's a good path to success.

I think that it's a collaborative process internally. Sam Lake is our writer, so he'll very much get caught in the fiction and the narrative and then our art people and our art director will get involved with: "How about we go with this stylisation for the world?"

But I think that it's such a small company that you can still have an input in various areas that fall outside of your realm. It's one of the ways that we can be more creative. If you have, say, a 300-400 person studio then it's very difficult to see how an individual can have an impact on that game, or it's limited to a more narrow category.

But clearly, obviously, we have people that are experts in their own fields and are very good at what they do. If you look at an AI programmer, he's going to be very good at AI, a rendering programmer good at rendering and an art director is good at directing art so clearly they'll do what they do. But it's about finding that balance, and making sure people are playing to their strengths.

First of all, we've had a very generous reception from the media and the fans. I think a lot of the hardcore gamers and people in the industry understand there's a lot of potential with Alan Wake and, hopefully, once again, we'll be able to redeem that potential and live up to the expectations that we have for ourselves and everybody else out there has for a Remedy game. We hold ourselves to a pretty high standard and we hope we'll match or exceed that.

We need to be fairly humble about it as well. We've been successful in the past but clearly that doesn't guarantee you're going to be successful in the future - you need to keep on working at it and improving, and there are a lot of great games out there. Expectations are huge for games and I think we need to constantly learn and develop.

I think that with Alan Wake we're still very much looking at traditional DVD delivery. But who knows in the longer term? I think we're just seeing the industry and even a wider spectrum of entertainment changing structures, and I'm sure that in the longer term we're going to see digital downloads and stuff like that on a wider scale than we do today.

There are quite a few exciting things happening there, but for us we wanted to maintain the traditional business model. I mean, building a new IP, and building our company and taking those technological and intellectual property risks and so-forth. I don't think you want to couple it with a business risk as well, to try out a new business model. I think there's enough on the plate as it is.