RIM's senior technical evangelist, Aaron Ardiri, has been trying to convince Apps World attendees of the virtues of BlackBerry 10 as a gaming platform.

The unreleased operating system will support a variety of SDKs, including Cascades, HTML5 BlackBerry WebWorks, Actionscript Adobe Air, and C/C++ native SDK.

A Java Android Runtime will also enable developers to convert Android apps to BB 10. It doesn't work perfectly for every title - it's not really designed for games - but certain Android apps can be ported to the platform with minimal effort.

And despite the preconceptions of some, BlackBerry App World actually has a reasonable reach; a subset of BlackBerry's 80 million global subscribers browse its virtual shelves, and it offers a less crowded marketplace offering greater visibility for developers than the App Store or Google Play.

Solid as a rock

BlackBerry 10 is a stable, responsive OS, too.

It's built on QNX, of course, a company that RIM acquired back in 2010. "This is an OS that's been in use for over 30 years," Ardiri explained. "We've taken the stability of QNX and built on top of it."

"With BB 10 we're focusing on a smooth, vivid user experience," he continued, explaining that RIM is aiming for a 60 frames per second experience for BlackBerry 10,

Ardiri also discussed another RIM acquisition: Scoreloop. "RIM has always been about messaging," he explained, and developers can tie their games into both Scoreloop and BBM to bring social features in-game.

Luring developers

Finally, Ardiri reiterated RIM's developer incentives, including the 10k program that guarantees BlackBerry app developers $10,000 revenue in their first year on BlackBerry App World.

There are caveats, of course – the app in question must be certified with RIM, and it must earn $1,000 within its first year on sale. Once it surpasses this total, RIM will top-up that amount to $10,000.

Indeed, Ardiri was keen to emphasise that there are no registration fees to develop for BlackBerry, and that "anything built using standard C libraries is easy to port to the platform."

Whether these offerings will be enough to lure developers over to BlackBerry 10 remains to be seen; at least until the first devices appear, early in 2013.