When UK PDA and smartphone game specialist Astraware was bought by US mobile applications and retail services company Handmark in early 2008, the talk was of synergy.

Two years on and following a management buyout, Astraware is once again an independent mobile game developer.

We caught up with CEO and founder Howard Tomlinson to find out what the company's plans are.

Pocket Gamer: So what was the deal with Handmark?

Howard Tomlinson: The fact was Astraware, a games development business, operating within Handmark, a media and news provision company, stopped looking sensible to both sides.

When we merged with Handmark, it was developing app stores for a lot of different companies, so providing content for it made sense. Since then the mobile business has changed and as a result, owning a games company didn't make so much sense.

The mutually acceptable decision we came to was it would be better to spin out the guys who wanted to build a longterm games business so they could do so.

What's the plan for Astraware now?

Over the past two years we've added BlackBerry and Android to supported platforms such as Symbian and iPhone.

In terms of games, we have what we call the Astraware big four - Astraware Solitaire, Astraware Casino, Astraware Sudoku and Astraware Boardgames - released for these platforms. We'll also shortly be adding Astraware Majhong back into that mix, which is a title we haven't had out for some time.

Now Palm has opened up for native development on the Pre, we'll be looking at that too.

So it's all about cross-platform development?

That's our real talent. The vast majority of app developers don't make money on iPhone. If you are a hobbyist, you might make some money and you can view it as making $1,000 from your hobby. That's great but if you've spent three months salary on a game that makes you $1,000, it's an entirely different situation.

Of course, you can look at Pocket God and those other million sellers because there are a minority of games that make it really big, but this doesn't scale very well for a business.

When we look at an iPhone game, if it makes $500 or $1,000 per month, it doesn't pay for its development. However if it does $500 on one platform, $300 on another, maybe on another four platforms, it will do $150 each per month. So we can look at development in terms of multiple small revenues over a longer timeframe.

This doesn't sound exciting. It's much more interesting to tell everyone 'We bet everything on 37 black and it came up and we made a million'. Everyone loves that story, but the reality of running a business is you try to create a lot of different kinds of products and hope you'll have security from some of them.

How are sales distributed across your games?

We still find that one or two in ten products make up 80 percent of our revenue, but we've become better at evaluating this ahead of time.

For example, we have a prototyping process whereby instead of embarking on the game's development, we prototype the game, play it for a while and then sit on it for a couple of weeks, until we've calmed down and stopped being quite so enthusiastic. Then we will evaluate it and try to think whether it's likely to be successful or whether we were just wrapped up in a crazy concept.

This enables us to step back and make more sensible choices, and hopefully increase our hit rate from two in ten to three in ten.

Will you be branching out in terms of the type of games you make?

We're known for traditional games and licences such as Bejeweled, but the business was launched on the back of a 2D shoot-'em up for Palm, Zap! 2000. What we discovered however was hardcore games typically cost more to develop and make less revenue, which steers you towards games that appeal to a wider demographic.

We will be releasing more 3D games though. We have one game that will be out on iPhone and Samsung's bada, and probably Windows Mobile and Android.

But I should point out my personal bugbear with 3D. I don't think you should make first person 3D games on a 3-inch screen because you can't have an immersive experience unless it covers 40 or 50 percent of your field of vision.

Instead we'll use 3D where it makes sense. For example, we might do something that looks like a vertical scrolling 2D shoot-'em up, but it uses 3D for better models and playing fields and visuals.

What about the content of your future games?

We can probably attempt some of the weirder stuff we've been thinking about for the past couple of years.

When you're part of an mid-west American publisher, its audience tends to be fairly conservative. For example, we've had issues with using joss sticks and horoscope symbols in games, not because of the people at Handmark but because of its audience.

As an independent company we can do a lot more. I'm not saying we're going to do a Baby Shaker app, but we might do something that's a bit closer to the Hot Dog Down a Hallway level of double entendre.

Thanks to Howard for his time.

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