There's never been a better time to be a small independent games developer. With the general explosion in casual games, not to mention the self-publishing opportunities offered by iPhone and the App Store – and not to forget the likes of Android, Xbox Live Arcade, the PlayStation Network, WiiWare and DS – perhaps the biggest issue is what to focus on.

Polish developer Vivid Games finds itself in such a happy situation. It's built up a solid reputation thanks to its work-for-hire activity, but now it's looking out for opportunities to flex its own wings. We caught up with CEO Remigiusz Koscielny to get his opinion on 2009.

Pocket Gamer: Mobile games are currently your main business but you've worked on other platforms, so do you expect mobile to continue to be your main focus?

Remigiusz Koscielny: The mobile market is going to be a harder and harder place for small development studios to live in. Vivid Games will, of course, stay with mobile but we will only focus on high quality games produced with in cooperation with big publishers. It's an approach we recently took with our games Samurai Puzzle Battle and Battle Blocks.

Also, during 2008, we started to explore other hardware platforms, such as Wii and iPhone and, for sure, this will continue in 2009. We expect to add new platforms to our support list, but we don't have plans to work on 100+ strong projects for next-gen consoles.

Your internal production technology is called V-TECH. What competitive advantage do you think it gives you?

It took us two years of hard work to develop V-TECH but it's the environment in which all our production staff work. It covers everything from code up to the preparation of marketing materials. More importantly, it means our game teams are purely focused on development, not hardware. We have support for nearly 1,000 devices and so it makes the porting process very easy. The other important advantage is that it enables us to easily reuse work.

You've started releasing games via the App Store, so what's your view on it?

Well, no doubt, the App Store has been the brightest star of 2008. I think the iPhone platform is a place where a good game in-and-off itself can shine enough for players to buy it, without the need for big brands or to be released by a big publisher.

When we look at the App Store deck, there are many small but fun games developed by unknown studios, or even individuals. For sure, this is something different to the mobile operators decks, where almost all of the top 10 or top 20 games are branded games from big publishers. It's very hard to break into that market with new IP.

Do you think Android will compete with the iPhone/App Store in 2009?

I don't think Android compete directly with iPhone, simply because the user install base is far behind iPhone and that won't change dramatically over the next year. However, Android is very good opportunity for developers because it has good production environment, and it has its own store, where developers can sell their games directly, without passing through aggregators or publishers. Of course, we know the paid store isn't launched yet, but it's a matter of weeks. Until then we are going to release our games through Handango.

We plan to make a strong footprint on Android. Expect to see our flagship games being available on Android shortly after mobile and iPhone releases.

Looking at your history, you've made some erotic games such as Sexy Poker, so are these sort of games successful?

Erotic content always sells well. We've produced number of our own erotic games, and five times more on a work-for-hire basis. Our top-selling erotic game Lesson of Passion sold dozen of thousands copies just in Poland so those games helped to finance our more expensive IPs. Our portfolio currently has enough erotic games though so we're focusing on other genres.

How do you get the right balance between work-for-hire and original content?

Vivid Games has been self-financing from the early days so work-for-hire was our only source of finance, at least until we started to earn revenue from our own games. The other advantage of work-for-hire is the knowledge transfer from publishers and the opportunity to work on challenging projects. We're still active in terms of work-for-hire and working with many publishers and media customers.

More generally, what were your favourite games in 2008?

I'm ahuge racing fan, so it is no surprise that my number one game was Burnout Paradise. I love the speed, the road rages and exploring the open city. For similar reasons, I also liked Midnight Club: Los Angeles.

Staying in racing genre, I enjoyed Mario Kart Wii. I play it and the DS version with my son. Besides those, I truly enjoyed Patapon on PSP, Call of Duty: World at War on the Xbox 360 and – of course – LittleBigPlanet on PS3. This year was great for the whole industry. Let's hope it stays that way next year too.

Our thanks to Remigiusz for his time.