Gearbox's Randy Pitchford

That's a good strategy, and in fact we have a concept at Gearbox called 'dynamic teams' - this is a method in which we use a number of great development partners around the world, some incredible talent that isn't all in one place.

There are times in a project that you know what you need, and you want to go to the best in the world to get it created in parallel as quickly as possible. By using dynamic teams we're able to do that, and it's very similar to the Hollywood idea - when Jerry Bruckheimer is interested in having the best effects in the world, he'll use one of the leading effects studios to do that for him, instead of having his own team that deals with that... so instead of only being able to do one thing at a time, you can work in parallel.

It's quite efficient, and can also help all of the industry to specialise and become better at its craft.

It's a big soup, and in there you're going to find all kinds of interesting ingredients. The scale is increasing, and the folks taking the risk are learning that the bigger bets that customers are interested in can really pay off, but that smaller bets might not - because the promise isn't fulfilled... and betting on things that customers aren't interested in is a great way to lose what you've risked.

So conceivably, the consequences of that understanding will be that more of us will be working towards fewer, more important and more relevant things.

Now, in any project there are layers of responsibility, authority and vision driving it - so there will always be some kind of hierarchy in terms of the goal and creative point of view. You'll find going forwards that some of the greatest things will emerge from non-independents, but some of them will still come from independents.

Maybe the total number of games will shrink - but the quality and value of those promises will probably increase.

We're really proud of the game - we had a lot of fun making it, and put a lot of joy into it, and we created a world that allowed us to take it seriously when we wanted to, but also to be very whimsical whenever any of us needed and wanted to.

So it covers a lot of range, and we're really excited that our customers are enjoying it. At the same time, it's a new experience for us - we've taken all of our expertise in making an FPS game with a very tight interface and clean, comfortable control, and blended into it something that we've never done before in levelling up, loot, dealing guns and other motivations that are really compelling for us in games like Diablo and other RPGs - but they haven't really successfully been introduced into an FPS yet.

So it was pretty challenging, and there was a lot of discovery in the process, but we're learned tremendous lessons. Right now, we had such a great time making the game, and have such momentum, that we're focusing a huge amount of our lessons and passions in keeping it going with downloadable content.

We've launched two DLC packs that have been incredibly successful - much more so than we anticipated, and people are really enjoying playing. We just announced our third, and it's really rare as a developer when you finish a game... typically when I've finished a game I'm completely exhausted, and I feel that we've done what we set out to do.

But with Borderlands it's been a unique experience, because as we were finishing, we didn't feel done. The game was still surprising us, and the opportunity to continue developing and exploring the project were also exciting - so we just kept going. It's rare that that happens, but it's been a lot of fun. The fact that it's selling, and our efforts are paying for themselves, is exciting too!