"The rise of the iOS devices has been the most disruptive thing that's happened to our business in the past 12 months," said Jonathan Smith, of TT Games, the Warners-owned studio behind the LEGO games, in the closing panel talk of Develop Liverpool, entitled Is The Wild West Back?

"Some very clever people in our company took the code from our DS LEGO Harry Potter game and we submitted it to Apple on a Monday and by Friday people were buying it, and now it's #1 in the UK.

"That's a very different process from the boxed product world we've experienced in the past."

Everything, everywhere

Roger Walkden of EA Partners agreed with situation, if not its overall positive sentiment.

"Choosing which of our brands to release on each platform is a difficult and very expensive business," he said.

"The customer wants to experience our brands in many ways. We're learning how to deal with that. We're putting out fewer, bigger, and hopefully greater titles."

But using PopCap's Bejeweled as an example of how to make a success of this approach, he also pointed out here are ways of tuning a game so that it works on different platforms - mobile, Facebook, web and console - and also can be monetised in the appropriate ways on each.

"And in such a situation, marketing is something that publishers can do to make a game a success across platforms," he added.

"It's not about sales and distribution any more."