There are plenty of companies who are committed to gaining the widest audience on mobile, and that typically means making games for the female, thirty-and-above market.

After all, it's these gamers who have fuelled the vast majority of growth of the PC casual space and Facebook gaming.

However, smartphone gaming used to be all about games for guys, at least until the rise of free-to-play.

So with competition high throughout the mobile gaming space, we're seeing a new focus to make games for what we'll have to call the core gaming market.

One such is US start up Industrial Toys, which comes to the market with a wealth of staff ranging from PC and console gaming, film special effects and the comics industry.

We caught up with Zeus president Tim Harris to find out some more about the company's plans.

Pocket Gamer: Why did you decide to form Industrial Toys and focus on core gaming for mobile?

Tim Harris: Alex [Seropian, co-founder of Bungie and Wideload] gave me a call when we were still working for other companies.





You mention 'specifically iOS, but really, across the board', so how wide do you hope to go - phone, tablets etc?

We'll focus on iOS and Android first, but we're not dogmatic about that.

We're excited to see how the mobile market is changing and we'll be open to developing for others too. But we're developing our first products for those.

Given your inexperience on mobile, how ambitious will your first projects be?

Thanks for saying that! I'm super-jazzed about this team. To answer the question, though - how about 'appropriately ambitious?'

Haha. We're not going to let ourselves off easy - we actually have quite a bit of mobile expertise on the team, and that element will combine with the console games expertise to try and reimagine what it means to be 'core' in a specifically mobile way.

We'll be tackling control schemes, environments, level set up and a bunch of other key game design issues from a combined perspective.

The hope is that we'll be tearing away those preconceptions of what a core game is and starting over with the ideas that we have on the mobile platform. And it really just boils down to designing for the device.

How much have you thought about business model (paid/free-to-play etc)?

Quite a bit, actually, but we're not ready to share - we still have some arguing to do!

Considering titles such as Infinity Blade and Gun Bros. are already popular on mobile, how do you think your games will fit into that space?

Those are great games. I'm a fan of both, and their success gave us heart. They are good examples of how we think there aren't enough games for core gamers out there. Every time I talk to a core gamer about mobile, I get the same thing: "I wish there were more."

Despite the massive number of games for mobile, there aren't enough of what we're talking about here. I hope our games fit into the must-haves of the platform.

Thanks to Tim for his time.

We'll certainly be keeping an eye on what Industry Toys gets up to; something you can also do via web, Facebook and Twitter.