Andrew Oliver, co-founder of Blitz Games Studios, has spent almost 10 years delivering hugely popular titles including the American Idol series and SpongeBob SquarePants games.

He cites diversity as key to navigating through the recession. "If you just focus on one big game, it’s either going to be a hit or a miss but if you’ve got five or six games it can strengthen your business."

He also sees outsourcing as a great way for games firms to grow while managing both risk and their overheads.

He explained: "Outsourcing makes you flexible. People say that outsourcing to, say, Malaysia gives you a lower quality but you are outsourcing to experts that only do this sort of work and the quality and the speed at which you get stuff done is amazing."

For Mark Rein, whose firm Epic Games created the Gears of War series, it is essential that developers and publishers across the industry don’t let the current economic gloom dampen their creative spirits.

He said: "You have to continue to have passion for what you are doing and work hard to do your best."

As outsourcing and staff-sharing comes to the fore, there is much talk in the games industry of developing the ‘Hollywood’ model - sourcing teams from scratch to work on particular projects before dismantling them at the end of the project, in the way that movies are made.

However, according to Mr Rein, there is a danger that this could lead to a lack of quality work within the industry.

He said: "The movie industry’s projects start with nothing and end with nothing . . . but that’s very difficult to do in a very high-skilled business like games.

"Firms have to learn from their mistakes and that’s hard to do if you constantly change the teams working together."