The second part of the interview tackles its other projects, both original intellectual properties, and commercial work-for-hire.
Pocket Gamer: What's ustwo's current philosophy when it comes to the App Store?
mills: We are focusing on three areas right now;
Development of own apps including Steppin, MouthOff, Inkstrumental, the 48hApps, a new ustwo CRAZO soundboard, and a super secret project I cant name but when launched will really help developers. All of our apps are based around our love for creating innovative, addictive, and creative applications. These apps also help highlight and promote our skills which leads the clients in.
The work we do for clients who pay us directly for our services, whereby they release the finished apps under their own name.
And we are now actively courting commercial clients where we base our model on a mixture of upfront payment and ongoing revenue share. We are also selling in our own app marketing services. This is the key area for us, as the days of being paid to make an app where we see no upside from its success are numbered.
Your next app to be released is Inkstrumental so you can explain how you hooked up with graffiti artist Jon Burgerman?
Inkstrumental is big. We wanted to make an app with a big investment - a super app - and an app that could build on an existing popular brand.
Jon has been a long time friend of the studio and was the perfect choice - although he doesn't actually own an iPhone - so we sat down over a few beers to iron out what the app would be about. It didn't take long to realise Jon has a love for the absurd. We wanted to bring his incredible characters to life in the iPhone environment, so after a few hours of idea generation, we came up with THE ONE, Inkstrumental - an animated, musical graffiti toy.
It enables users to compose and share musical chaos using Jon's designs. Use it for birthdays, Christmas, Halloween, or just to impress/annoy your mates. There are a few music creators out there already, but this one is special, it's all about the design.
What are you up to with commercial clients such as Reebok and Cartoon Network??
The Reebok project is something we can't talk about until it launches, but what I will say is that it will be our first dual phone two player app and is something we're very proud of. We are expecting Apple to sign it off this week.
The Cartoon Network (Turner Broadcasting) app is one of the proudest moments in our app life. They teamed up with us to launch their first branded iPhone app in the UK, a Ben 10-branded MouthOff release that's out now.
Ben 10 MouthOff is our first foray into branding - based around our 40,000-selling MouthOff app. It uses original animation throughout and sound effects taken directly from the hugely popular series.
Fans of Ben 10 can impress their friends by emulating the mouth movements of their favourite alien characters, placing their iPhone in front of their own mouths and seeing the visuals on the phone screen move in correspondence to their speech.
Joe Braman, commercial director, mobile, digital & DVD at Turner Broadcasting said: "As the stellar brand of the moment for bots, Ben 10 was an obvious choice for our first iPhone app, but we didn't want it to be something we did for the sake of it. ustwo's MouthOff app stood out to us in terms of innovation, creativity, usability and longevity - the key components for a successful App."
We also have another two branded applications launching in the next month. But you'll have to wait for new about those...
Thanks to mills for his time.
You can keep up to date with the activity at ustwo via web and Twitter.
And the Inkstrumental website is here.
