After years of rumour, Rovio published its first third-party game in June.

And Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage from UK developer Nitrome has proved to be a good debut.

Like Angry Birds, the physics-based puzzler has impressed with its high production values, replayability, also gaining plenty of great reviews.

But it's only the first of many, so we caught up with Rovio's senior publishing manager Jussi Immonen to find out more about the company's publishing strategy.

Pocket Gamer: There had been a lot of rumours about Rovio's publishing, so was it always something you wanted to do?

Jussi Immonen: There are many plans and projects flying around in Rovio, and publishing has been brought up before.

Basically we felt that we need to do this right - wait for the right time and see that all the pieces fit together as they should.

Why is publishing important for Rovio?

Going into publishing was simply a very logical step for us. Rovio Entertainment is expanding not only in size, but also in scope.

We are an entertainment company, a conglomeration of internal game studios, an animation studio, a book publisher and now also a game publisher. All of these parts fit together and support each other.

Is this more about giving something back to the development community or do you expect that Rovio Stars will offer the sort of potential profitability as your internal games do?

Well, honestly it's a little bit of both. Of course our own internal development and IPs are really strong, and we have plenty of projects in the production pipeline.

Rovio is not that far away from the start-up years, and we feel giving back to the indie development community is very important. Getting ahead and getting noticed in the avalanche of games in the app stores continues to be very difficult for a smaller developer.

Rovio Star's first release Icebreaker's top grossing performance on the US iPad chart - via apptrace

Just having a great game is not necessarily enough, you also need the reach to get the game to the fans. Rovio can lend its considerable expertise in both giving the games that final polish and bringing them to the customers.

Also, we do more for the Rovio Stars games than traditional publishers, such as lending our know-how in QA and helping with the final stages of the development progress.

For many developers Rovio Stars is a unique opportunity with huge business potential.

Do you think some developers will be hesitant to work with Rovio because they think their games will be competing in some way with Angry Birds?

Well, we are looking for developers who believe in their game so much they feel they can compete with Angry Birds! But seriously, I think the developers will quickly see the benefits in partnering with Rovio.

Angry Birds is, however, a great benchmark of quality and hopefully something that developer can reach when working together with Rovio.

Do you have a vision of how many games will be released through Rovio Stars each year?

We will be publishing a handful of carefully selected games, and publishing every game will be an event in itself.

Icebreaker is a physics-puzzler

What are the key attributes for a Rovio Stars game?

What we are looking for in Rovio Stars games are great playability, engaging gameplay, memorable characters, maybe a little bit of offbeat humour, and games that are fun to play for all ages, from kids to grandparents.

A high replay value is also important; we are looking for games people can spend a lot of time playing.

Will you be mixing up paid and free-to-play games?

Pricing model is something where we will do what makes the most sense for the game in question.

This means that there will probably be both paid and F2P games in the future.

How did you come across Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage and why did it stand out?

The key reasons for selecting Icebreaker to be a Rovio Stars game were addictive gameplay, unique visual style and interesting characters.

What can you say about the sort of publishing deals you offer in terms of whether you providing funding, how complete you like a game to be, what sort of minimum guarantees you can offer?

We are currently looking for games that are in fairly advanced stage of production, i.e. there's a playable version of an alpha. Otherwise we deal with the projects and developers on an individual basis.

Rovio Star's next release is 5 Ants' Tiny Thief

We work on fair revenue share basis. All-in-all our business case is very good for developers since with our cross-promotion leverage we can make our huge fan base aware of each carefully selected game that we publish under Rovio Stars.

There's more information for the developers in the Rovio Stars website: http://www.rovio.com/stars

Thanks to Jussi for his time.