With RIM talking up a supposed return to its base in enterprise, its only natural developers working on BlackBerry platforms would be worried about their future.

In response, the Canadian giant has dedicated much of its time at BlackBerry World 2012 in Orlando talking up the commercial opportunity both PlayBook and forthcoming BlackBerry 10 handsets represent for studios.

Cross-platform outfit Uken Games would appear to agree.

The Toronto studio, which has worked on most major mobile platforms as well as Facebook, has just released Mighty Monsters on iOS - Uken's attempt at capturing a Pokemon style audience on mobile - but the firm isn't solely focused on iPhone and co.

We caught up with co-founder Chris Ye to ask why, with a multitude of platforms at its fingertips, Uken only has good things to say about BlackBerry.

Pocket Gamer: Tell us a bit about Uken Games.

Chris Ye: Uken is one of the only truly cross platform gaming companies around.

We started out three years ago as two founders building games for Facebook and now we're a team of over 30, supporting seven games on five platforms - iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, and Facebook.

We've grown our user base substantially to well over one million monthly active users and, really, we're just getting started. Most recently, we've set out to reinvent the monster collection genre that Pokemon made famous with our latest title Mighty Monsters for iOS. We think it's going to be huge.

What issues do you face following a multiplatform startegy?

It's certainly not easy. We've spent the last two years building out a really solid infrastructure layer that lends itself to cross platform development. We've built internal services around things like authentication, payments, notifications, deep analytics, and more which are very reliable and scalable.

On top of this, all the games we've shipped so far have been largely built in HTML5, which makes the cross platform strategy easier. It's paid off as we've been able to tap into a much larger audience.

At the same time, many of our players will play on both a mobile device and Facebook resulting in a much more engaged player. Those are the exact players we're searching for.

How successful has Uken been with the BlackBerry audience?

We're one of the biggest game developers on BlackBerry so it has been significant for us. Forces of War is currently number five on the top free games list and our other titles are not far off.

While BlackBerry hasn't had the best reputation as a developer friendly platform, RIM has been incredibly helpful to us making the process easier and I am optimistic about BB10.

From a market perspective, RIM still shipped 10 million BlackBerry devices in the last quarter, so it's certainly still a significant platform.

Many of your games are currently standalone. Are their sequels on the way?

Like any major piece of software, we view game development as a continuous process. Unlike the console world where the launch of a game is the end of the party, we view the launch as day one.

With all the titles that we've put out, we've remained committed to constantly improving them and we have. We deploy code on a weekly, sometimes, daily basis releasing new features, updates, and content to our games. We view it as fostering a really strong and engaged community and we think we still have a long way to go with our current games.

That being said, we know we'll eventually reach a point where it's easier to simply do a new game and we're excited for that as well. We think hard about what would make our players happier.

How is the development scene in Toronto, where you're based?

Toronto's a great place to build games because there are really strong developer and creative communities here.

The indie scene is kicking and there are a ton of events designed to promote game development such as the upcoming TO Jam, taking place between 11-13 May in which over 400 people will form teams and build a game in just 48 hours. Some of the results in the past 6 TO Jam's have been mind blowing and Uken is excited to be a major sponsor this year.

It's also a beautiful city to live in with a lot of diversity and great food!

What does the future hold for Uken Games?

As I mentioned, we've spent a lot of time building out reliable and scalable internal infrastructure and services to help make cross platform game development easier.

We're beginning to really leverage that infrastructure and build more high quality titles so expect some major releases from us later in the year.
Thanks to Chris for his time.For more information including job vacancies, visit Uken Games' website.