During GDC 2010, we got the opportunity to catch up with Neil Young, CEO of ngmoco.

In the first part of three articles, we talk about the similarities and differences between moving to the freemium - or as Young prefers to call it, the free2play - model on Apple devices compared to the wider, and to-date commercially more successful social web model practised by the likes of Zynga, Playfish and Playdom.

Pocket Gamer: Why do you think the social web gaming companies like Zynga haven't come to iPhone in a big way yet?

Neil Young: There's definitely a scale issue in terms of dealing with 75 million iPhone OS devices versus 450 million Facebook users.

I also think the social fabric on the iPhone isn't as well defined as on Facebook yet, but that's a factor of how new the platform is. As Apple rolls out new OS releases, I imagine you'll see tighter integration between it and other social networks.

So would you be happy for Apple to roll out its own social platform despite its impact on your Plus+ network?

Absolutely. It wouldn't destroy the Plus+ network. That's about creating a social graph for gamers, not a social graph on the device. Through Plus+ we've providing all the functionality we wish the OS would provide for us, but anything that reduces friction between players is a good thing. I would be delighted if that happened.

Going back to your original question though, as well as issues for scale and social fabric, there's also a device issue. It's non-trivial to build games for the iPhone, and the direction the market is going in isn't towards smaller and simpler applications.

So if you're operating in the social web space, you've been thinking about moving from PHP to Flash. If you've watched the transition that the social web companies have made from the likes of Mafia Wars and Mobsters to higher calibre Flash games, they've had to retool their entire organisations. And they don't have the competency to think about OpenGL.

On iPhone a lot of skills from handheld and console development - at least on the client side - now become relevant. And the challenge becomes how do you combine those client side skills with the competencies that the social web companies have, to make compelling experiences that deliver rich graphics and worlds which are woven within this free2play model?

I think it's those three things: the size of market; social fabric; and complexity of hardware that will hold up those guys up from dominating this space.

The Facebook model is to release games and drop them quickly if they don't work. With iPhone you have to invest more upfront in terms of graphics so how will that work out for ngmoco longterm?

There are ways you can test your concepts and products before release. Our development processes are built around a model called Minimum Viable Product. We tried to build our games within 3-6 months and then have the discipline to hold them if they're not right. And when we release them, we iterate in the wild.

You can see that when we release a product in Canada. One piece of the puzzle is testing the physical infrastructure and the other is Canada is a representative market, not just in terms of geography, but from a socio-economic and demographic standpoint.

You can get a good sense of whether the product is going to resonate, and if it doesn't you have a sense of the things you can do to change it.

Both Eliminate and Touch Pets have evolved massively since launch in terms of the functionality in the software, the content, the way in which the systems work on the servers, and the monetisation and social frameworks. And all these things will continue to evolve. I don't think we're that far away from the model that operates in the social web.

Still, we pride ourselves on releasing games that look good, and we're going to continue to do that and not give people a lame experience to test whether the game is an interesting concept.

Thanks to Neil for his time.

You can read the second part of our interview about how ngmoco and Freeverse will dominate the iPhone free2play market here.

And there third part about repositioning Plus+ as the standard tech for free2play iPhone games here.