Hired as part of its The Astonishing Tribe (TaT) acquisition in late 2010, Anders Jeppsson has hit the ground running.

As RIM's head of gaming, he's had to overcome years of neglect, promoting the company to a game development community with which it's previously had little contact.

It's a good thing he used to be a developer himself, running Swedish outfit Southend Interactive (known for ilomilo and Desert Wind) for the past decade.

After getting initial misconceptions out of the way, he says the reaction has been broadly positive, no doubt helped by RIM's largesse in terms of giving out Blackberry PlayBook tablets.

Rovio, oh Rovio

The first fruits of the charm offensive can now be seen on the PlayBook's App World store with the release of key titles such as Angry Birds, Cut the Rope and Backbreaker 2. Plants vs Zombies is due any day too.

"You can make money selling games on BlackBerry, even just for PlayBook," Jeppsson says.

Indeed, four of the top 10 top grossing apps across the whole of BlackBerry ecosystem are PlayBook games, despite its install base being tiny compared to the 75 million people using the company's phones.

One reason is that prices are higher. Angry Birds goes for $5 instead of 99c on the Apple App Store.

Man in the mirror

Yet, Jeppsson's job is much more than getting games onto the platform.

A large proportion of his early work has been internal; ensuring games are recognised as being core within a business that was focused on telecoms infrastructure and corporate customers.

"It's a big change for the organisation but 80 percent of our devices are bought by the mass market," he remarks.

"Games are important to us and the company understands that. I get a lot of mails from our VPs about games.

Waiting for BB10

Of course, RIM itself remains in a transitional state.

PlayBook is its first device to use the new QNX operating system, since rebranded as the PlayBook Tablet OS and about to receive its key 2.0 version update.

However, until the company releases its first smartphones based on the platform in the autumn - then to be called BlackBerry 10 - it won't have the software/hardware combination to compete with the likes of Android and Windows Phone, let alone iOS.

Jeppsson says part of his job is to get developers prepared for that moment.

"When BB10 launches, we're going to selling millions of devices very quickly, so developers should be ready for the opportunity," he points out.

From the ground up

To aid in this, RIM's heavily invested in overhauling its tools and development ecosystem, which was previously seen as being difficult.

Developers can now sign up for free, the much maligned signing servers have been improved, while the formal processes and flow through the developers' portal has been streamlined by the user experience experts at TaT.

An internal gaming team has also been set up.

It's ported open source standards such as the Bullet and Box2D physics engines, the Lua scripting language, and the C++ port of cocos2d (cocos2d-x), not to mention ensuring support for standards such as OpenGL and OpenAL within BlackBerry's SDK.

Third party tools such as Marmalade and ShiVa3D are supported, with more expected.

RIM's even working on its own open source 3D framework, called gameplay. It's designed to teach people, including students, how to code native games at a low level.

Building a bridge

"We're lowering the barriers to help developers," Jeppsson says

"They need to be going cross-platform. They need to be working in C++."

To some extent, this is a case of turning RIM's current weakness as the third or fourth ranked mobile platform into a strength. It needs developers to be cross-platform for it to get support.

But it's also true that the trends are industry-wide.

"In the long run, no one's going to be competing for audience in terms of having exclusive games. Even hardware becomes commoditised," he argues.

The real deal

And this is when Jeppsson's eyes light up.

In such a market, RIM believes its BBM social layer, combined with its Scoreloop gaming network, will provide a strong competitive advantage because of its inherent virality, boosting activity and providing a great distribution channel.

But, as with BB10 smartphones, the promise is for jam tomorrow, not today.

The first features using Scoreloop will included in the PlayBook Tablet 2.0 OS update, but the best Jeppsson can publicly say now is that such features will be constantly updated until BB10 formally launches. That's expected sometime around September.

Between the lines

There's a similar enthusiasm for his vision for 'serialisation of game state', something he first mentioned at DevCon Americas in October, and which the company will be talking about more during BlackBerry World in May.

It's a vision for sharing content across devices, which in RIM's case will range from smartphones and tablets to cars, as the QNX OS runs on 450 vehicles models.

"Apple's AirPlay is a simple example of synergy between devices," Jeppsson says.

"It's going to be a showcase differentiator for us because it will just work. Developers won't have to code for it and it will provide a better user experience."

That's still months, if not years away. And while it's good to have a vision, there's plenty for RIM's gaming team to work on now.

The release of Plants vs Zombies will be another step in the right direction, and something - combined with free PlayBooks - that will encourages more studios to develop for the platform.

Far now, part of RIM's future rests upon demonstrating it gets games, and is a friend to game developers.

"If you do the right things, good things will happen," Jeppsson says.