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

In the final part of our series, we talked about the switch to the free2play model, as well as ngmoco's plans to open up its Plus+ social gaming network as the technology developers will use to deploy such games.

Pocket Gamer: The shift to freemium games has been a major one for ngmoco so why do you think it's so much better than the paid app model?

Neil Young: Fundamentally I think the free2play model can help developers make more money than they are making now. There are two challenges. One is discoverability and the other is making money, and they are inextricably linked.

What we've found as we've moved our business to free2play, is we make more money, more consistently and from more places. And we make it whether the game is in or out of the chart because it's not based on a download moment, it's based on usage.

If you think about how you play games, you'll play games you've downloaded that aren't in the charts and that's a really fundamental shift.

What we're trying to do is be the leader in this space, and take all the knowledge and learning we've accrued over the seven free2play games we've released, productised that knowledge within Plus+ and then make that available to the development community to use in their software.

Going forward, Plus+ is going to be all about free2play functionality, and opening up the SDK for more people to use it.

What's going to be the business model?

It will remain free to use but we will share ancillary revenues streams. Not in-app purchases. Developers are already giving up 30 percent of their revenue to Apple. We think there's a big enough pie that developers can keep their IAP.

Instead we'll be looking at Cost Per Install sales and ad sales. Incremental revenue streams are the place that we can rev share on.

You must have a lot of server infrastructure in place now?

Absolutely. We host our infrastructure in two layers. There's the central infrastructure and the game-specific infrastructure, which can be centrally located or dispersed. Eliminate's infrastructure has central Plus+ components and then game-specific elements that are located on the West Coast, Central, East Coast and Europe, due to latency issues.

But if you look at the set of systems we've been able to put in place in Plus+, in terms of between hardware systems and software services, we're starting to get to the place where we can offer a pretty interesting set of services to thirdparties that will enable them to make the same sort of games as ngmoco do.

Thanks to Neil for his time.

You can read the first part of our interview on why iPhone social gaming won't be dominated by Zygna and Playfish here.

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