Connect2Media is moving swiftly towards a cross-platform games publishing strategy, following the company's recent decoupling from Hands-On Mobile.

Earlier this week, the company announced plans to release 12 Android games, but also indicated its intention to expand to iPhone, Wii and Xbox 360.

"It's about the games, not about what platform they're on," says John Phillips, product director at Connect2Media. "We're supporting all these native mobile platforms, but we're also supporting Xbox Live Arcade, WiiWare, Zune in the US, right through to interactive TV."

Although the company's first announced Android game is the relatively safe choice of Classic Card Games EX, Phillips says Connect2Media has ambitious plans to build cross-platform own-IP hits too.

"We've got one franchise coming in Q1 next year which is brand new and very innovative," he says. "It's not just one game - it's a minimum of four, and will be the first thing that goes across the board for us. It'll be something consumers can get behind in a big way."

Although many games publishers are now looking to release their titles on as many platforms as possible, most start from one and then see where else they can take it.

Phillips says Connect2Media is making cross-platform part of the process from the planning stages of any new game. "It's changing the way we're looking at games when they're in the early project stages," he says.

"Will they work across all these platforms? Can the gameplay be scaled back or scaled up? It's all of that, but it comes back to a pure design ethic. And that's what designers here are loving. It's about how do we design games that can go across this whole swathe of devices, from HDTVs to Java phones."

Phillips maintains that Connect2Media's games will take advantage of the different strengths of all these game platforms - for example accelerometers on the Wii and iPhone. But he's bullish about the fact that gameplay will come first.

"There are a lot of times when people write a game specifically for a platform and its features," he says.

"We saw that with Wii, when people started doing really clever things with the controllers, and maybe not thinking as much about whether the gameplay itself is playable and fun. For us, it's less about how can the Wii controller be used in an innovative way, and more about what's the most natural way for the user to play the game with that controller."

The publisher is about to kick off a beta program to get users testing its games on a long-term basis - something that Phillips says Hands-On didn't do before, but was an established part of the process at his previous employer, smartphone games publisher Astraware.

Doesn't this 'one core game, many platforms' strategy fall down when you start encountering demographic and cultural differences between the different platforms? There's a perception that Android users may be more geeky than the predominantly casual gamers buying iPhone games, for example.

"It really doesn't make a difference," says Phillips. "The early adopters are the people who drive a platform and OS in its early days, but they're not the lion's share of people who end up buying games for those platforms. When the [first Android phone] G1 hits, people won't even know it's an Android phone, but they will still want software for it."

Connect2Media is preparing to relaunch its website in November, including the Google Checkout payment technology - which Phillips says is due to the assumption that Android Market will also use that, once it starts allowing paid downloads early next year.

The interesting thing for a firm like Connect2Media, which is seeking to make hits out of its own-IP games, is that Android Market, the iPhone App Store, and even Xbox Live Arcade and WiiWare represent new ways to get these games to market - in contrast to the struggles of selling original IP games through mobile operators.

"Look at what Gameloft has done on WiiWare with TV Show King," he says. "This is an opportunity to create new brands and new IP, and then take them back to mobile. People who are interested in what you're producing can buy it, and it's not being dictated by someone above saying it will only appear on this platform or page for a certain length of time."

So, if Connect2Media plans to release its games across lots of different platforms at once, will they interact with each other in some way? Not necessarily full multiplayer, but some kind of connectivity.

"In the first iteration, we've got to be sensible and produce games that are basically the same games across all platforms," says Phillips.

"But later, we might be able to start having, say, a mobile version that complements the Xbox Live Arcade version, or the iPhone version that complements the interactive TV version. Sub-games, training, extra awards that unlock things in other versions of the game... It's all possible."

Social gaming is also on Connect2Media's agenda, thanks to the boom in Facebook applications. "It's certainly not something you can ignore," he says. "We love what the guys at Playfish are doing, for example. It's great to see that level of game quality on a social networking site, allied to the interactivity of your friends list."

Connect2Media's cross-platform strategy is due to kick into gear in the first quarter of next year, including that mysterious new franchise mentioned earlier. Phillips says the company's designers are relishing the task.

"Traditionally, they had to come up with ideas that were constrained. Now they can work outside that, and go for the biggest possible opportunity with a title. At least two of our new games use a gameplay dynamic that I've never seen before..."

He pauses. "Ultimately, it's about making the games the most important factor in what you're doing as a business. A lot of the thread in the mobile games industry has been about licences and technology. We want to go back to the heart of what makes this industry so great to work in: the games."