At the end of 2008, we caught up with Remigiusz Koscielny, CEO of Polish mobile developer Vivid Games to get his opinions on where the industry was headed, as well as how Vivid was planning to deal with the changes.

Ten months on, it time to see how things are panning out for the studio which mixes its own game development with work-for-hire projects for publishers such as I-play.

Pocket Gamer: How have you found the App Store during 2009, especially in terms of pricing?

99c games aren't the best thing for a publisher on any platform, because the volume of sales has to be really high to cover your development budget.

However, working on relatively small games - fun to play and suitable for the core audience - might be the right way to go. At the moment, many of the App Store Top 100 are 99c, so we have to follow the trend. And this is our plan - small, but nice, fun to play 99c games such as our upcoming Boozle and Bubblo.

Can you build a business on 99c games?

Yes, I think that 99c iPhone games can do the business, but not for everyone.

Of course, the first category are the big boys with big brands, which will sell anyway. The second category - where we belong - are innovative, new intellectual properties and to have success with these, we need to consider two major issues.

The game needs to have a relatively small development budget, so probably be produced in countries with less expensive development costs. And the game has to be hit in the Top 100 list. If the game is good, it should be able to defend itself.

Can you explain how you ended up making the iPhone game, Deal or No Deal: Around the World?

We developed Deal or No Deal: Around the World for I-play earlier in 2009. We put a lot of effort into the project and I think the quality level is very high. The difference compared to the previous editions is tremendous. As you can see, even Apple liked it, which is why the game made it into the Hot and Noteworthy section.

How do you balance your work with the likes of I-play with developing your own games?

Vivid has been doing work-for-hire projects since the start, back in 2003, even before we started to think about production of our own games.

Right now, we have mix of work-for-hire and our own projects, which is good because this structure provide income from two independent streams which secure each other.

However the most important thing is to keep a good balance between them. It is easy to get stuck with only work-for-hire projects because of the strong demand from publishers. This would lead us to having no resources available for our own games. But, what's important is that in both cases we are delivering a quality products.

You've released your own Facebook game - Alien Blobs. Why?

To be honest, it was more of an experiment with the Facebook development environment than a serious project.

The plan is to use Facebook as a source of information about our games and build a fan base. Our upcoming Boozle iPhone game already has a Facebook page with lot of cool stuff and global highscore list as well. You can share your biggest and most impressive pukes, or just give us some feedback on the game.

Some of our iPhone games will also have short version of the game on Facebook to immerse players and encourage them to buy the iPhone version.

How important is the Java market currently for Vivid?

Java market is less and less attractive for us. When the App Store exploded last year, it opened many eyes on the differences between J2ME and iPhone, not only in terms of development, but foremost in terms of the business structure.

At this moment we only make around four J2ME games annually, which this year have included new editions of our Speedway and Ski Jumping games, as well as some iPhone ports. On the top of this, we also do work-for hire-projects.

But the proportion of the time we spend on J2ME compared to other platform has reversed from 2007 to 2009. Right now it only accounts for five to ten percent of our development bandwidth.

Have you been disappointed about the slow development of Android as a games platform?

While I never thought Android would get close to the App Store in terms of importance, I didn't imagine it would be so bad.

First of all, as a developer from Poland, we still cannot submit our games to the Android Market, which obviously exclude us doing anything.

So even though we have developed an Android port of our award-winning Samurai Puzzle Battle game, and it won 2009 Best Action/Adventure Game at the Handango Champion Awards, we can't do anything on the Android Marketplace.

What's your view on other platforms such as Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Ovi etc?

I think we'll do straight-forward ports of our iPhone games to platforms like Zune HD. As for J2ME-based games - meaning BlackBerry, Ovi, Samsung App Store - I don't think that we will do a lot. It's simply too much work compared to the potential revenues.

Will Vivid be moving into PSP Minis or DSiWare development?

Vivid has been present in DS development for many years actually. To date, we've developed a couple of DS games for external customers and one based on our own IP, but the DS market is difficult at the moment. Finding a publisher for retail releases is so hard so there's a great chance our DS game will end up as a DSi game.

Apart of that, we have another DSi game development project planned and we are thinking about PSP Minis too.

What do you think will be the big trends in 2010?

I think the hype will remain with App Store, although platforms such as PSP Minis might change things. Still, I don't think any other store will get close to the 85,000 apps and 2 billion downloads of the App Store.

Other than this, I think the most important thing in 2010 will be to have your eyes wide open for good opportunities.

Thanks to Remigiusz for his time.

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