"This right here is effectively the future of where the industry is going," he said about the way games will be made. "It's the Hollywood production model. I'm not saying we're Hollywood – but it's the Hollywood production model.
"Ten years ago, outsourcing wasn't even possible in this industry," he said. "Now we have outsourcing all over the world." And though Streamline was successful as a content service company – since 2002, they've had at least one title per year that was a platinum seller – Fernandez pointed out that the games business is changing, with studio consolidations, the rise of casual games, and mass-scale digital distribution inching closer to reality.
Which leads to "the brave new development world," one of distributed development and domain expertise. "My last project had five studios working on a project," Fernandez said. "It sounds scary," he admitted, but the key is communication.
And the benefit is leveraging the strength from the other companies toward the project. "Knowing what you're good at is key. Knowing what you're not good at is better. And accepting what you're not good at is supreme."
Fernandez repeatedly returned to his theme of 'outsourcing evolved.' "There isn't a publisher worldwide that doesn't have an outsourcing strategy," he said, adding that most of those strategies are flawed, but exist nonetheless.
"Outsourcing is not about cost," Fernandez stressed. "It's never been cheap, it never will be cheap." The delusion of outsourcing is that it will somehow save your product money, he said.
But the truth of outsourcing is to bring a company expertise it doesn't have, cannot find, or cannot get a hold of. "It's not cheap," repeated Fernandez.
"We've seen the rise of over 300 outsourcing companies worldwide. Out of those, only 25 can do everything. And only 10 matter."
"We are putting ourselves in the revolutionary role," said Fernandez. "The revolution started from refusing to undercut or underbid." It's his contention that outsourcing studios have a tremendous wealth of knowledge.
"These studios often have more production experience than the people they're working for." Streamline, for example, works on six projects at a time, and has completed over thirty projects. "Our clients come to us to help fix what's gone wrong, or keep from going wrong."
His view is based on partnerships – that good partners are stable partners, and that businesses understand the importance of working with a company that will stay in business. It's so valuable, he thinks, that "you cannot compete on price - that is not how it works."
Ultimately, he predicts that outsourcing will end, and co-production will begin. So what makes co-production any different? "You get back-end," said Fernandez. In other words, the relationship changes, and suddenly the companies contributing content are eligible for royalties if that content achieves some commercial success.
Fernandez explained that outsourcing companies turned into a commodity based business. "You do all of the ****ing work, and you don't even get a taste of the back-end. It's like being a slave."
Particularly since outsourcing is so often the work that the developers don't want to do themselves. But the royalty is key, said Fernandez. It changes the nature of the relationship, to one of collaboration based on mutual strengths.
"You work hard, you get paid. If you did good, you get paid again."
Story filed by N. Evan Van Zelfden in Singapore