At the start of the week, we spoke to NaturalMotion CEO Torsten Reil about the company's new iOS freemium title My Horse, and its decision to focus on free-to-play games.

In the second part of the interview, we talk more generally about the company's approach to smartphone gaming and intricacies of the mobile ecosystems.

Pocket Gamer: Why did NaturalMotion originally get excited about the potential of gaming on phones?

Torsten Reil: What we wanted to do was combine accessible gameplay with really high-end visuals - both on the graphical side but also on the animation side because that's our background.

We feel there's a big opportunity with devices like iPhone. They're being used by a mainstream audience, not just hardcore gamers, so there's a much larger volume of people we can reach. And we feel like those people want to be wowed, just like anyone else.

In the past, we haven't had the opportunity to wow a mainstream audience, because we didn't have the platform. We had Flash on Facebook and that could only do 2D. There's a conception that the casual audience is only into 2D, and we don't think that's true.

A good example of this is the animated movie industry, which is truly mainstream: almost as mainstream, as mass market, as it gets. That's gone from Snow White to Toy Story and now Toy Story 3. In terms of visual 'wow', this goes beyond anything that games have been able to do.

It's pretty good evidence that the market wants to be wowed with high quality visual content. So, if you can make a game that's fun to play and easy to get into, I think you can address a huge audience and that's what we've been trying to do.

Why do you think more companies haven't tried this?

It's still a very new market. Most of the games on smartphones so far are made either by mobile developers or developers with a Facebook background. It's only recently that developers with a console background have looked very seriously at making games for smartphones.

A good example is Epic and Chair Entertainment with Infinity Blade. It combines accessible controls with extremely high-end graphics, and it's done extremely well commercially.

We'll see more and more of this: I think we'll see the market go high-end very quickly, in terms of the actual experience.

You've previously released consoles game, but, in future, are you exclusively targeting mobiles?

It depends how you define it. We have pretty strong console technology and a very strong console team. But, to be honest, a lot of this knowledge is applicable to iPhone and Android as well, because the performance is going up so quickly on those devices that the distinctions between console and mobile are becoming less and less valid.

In the next couple of years, if you look at some of the chip manufacturers' predictions, whether it's Imagination or Nvidia, we're going to be close to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 performance on those chips. So, what is a console and what is a mobile? Those boundaries are becoming very blurry.

Do you plan to develop all your games in-house now?

We're doing a lot of stuff in-house already, but, equally, we're working with external partners [such as Ideaworks and MunkyFun] and I believe that's going to stay the same.

Whenever external partners who we like working with are available, we seriously consider it. But, yes, we are also significantly extending our in-house capacity.

What's the status of your new London studio?

It's up and running. It's still quite small, but we're recruiting heavily into it right now.

You had excellent support from Apple, so how do you nurture that relationship?

It sounds really clichéd, but the most important thing is to build a game that's good and polished. That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to give each game an extra bit of time to achieve that level of polish in terms of the visuals and the gameplay.

Then it boils down to Apple's decision as to whether it wants to feature it or not. I think it's possible to increase the likelihood of that by going for quality.

But how does the relationship work?

It's obviously important to have some kind of relationship with Apple, but I can't go into too much detail about it. It's important that Apple's aware of your games, the games you have coming up, and the quality level that you're trying to hit.

But at the end of the day, there is no special treatment for anyone. It's all about the quality of the game itself. If the game is good, it stands a good chance of being featured, but there are no guarantees.

Why don't you release Lite versions of your games?

That's a good question. We had a Lite version of the original Backbreaker, just before Christmas 2009, but we took it off the market because we found that we didn't need it for additional traffic.

That's been our strategy throughout, but that doesn't mean I'm ruling out Lite versions in the future. They may well happen.

With regards to Android, how importance are the high piracy rates?

To be honest, I don't have the latest figures on that. I know historically it's been a problem, but I don't know the latest figures for our latest games. Google has been working pretty hard to get it stamped out.

Would it ever dissuade you from developing for the platform?

We are on Android: we just launched out latest game, NFL Rivals on it. Clearly, going forward, piracy is less of an issue for our free-to-play games.

Thanks to Torsten for his time.