Astraware boss talks take-over, smartphones, Android and Apple

It was on Monday that UK smartphone/PDA game developer Astraware announced it had been bought by US mobile media outfit Handmark.

Despite not being particularly well-known outside of its niche market, Astraware has built up a strong reputation, both for its games and business sense over the past five or so years, so we thought it only polite to quiz CEO Howard Tomlinson (pictured) concerning how the company had got to this point, the Handmark deal and, of course, his views on the future of the smartphone gaming sector.

Howard Tomlinson: Back then [2000], the market was people like us - highly technical early adopters. We wanted games, so it seemed obvious that other people would too. Our first games were those that we thought would be fun, hence that's why our first popular game was Zap!, and then Zap!2000, which were vertical scrolling shooties, my favourite genre.

I didn't realise at the time, although I knew the game felt really great on handhelds. It turned out to be so helpful as it bought in good revenue at a time when the dollar was quite strong, so it helped us to grow.

The casual games market was only just starting at that time, and the games were mostly web games which translated well to handhelds. It was a mix between contacting other companies myself, and them seeing what we'd done already and contacting us. We took on a lot of licenses between 2001-2004. David [David Oakley, CTO] calls this the 'Great IP Landgrab', as we really became known as the major handheld (and then smartphone) company to work with on licensed games.

Another early move you undertook was setting up as a publisher and aggregator. As a developer, why did you decide to do take that step?

It was actually a much simpler process than it might appear. We were selling direct to our customers from very early on in the business, so we'd created all of our own infrastructure anyway: marketing; web servers and shopping cart; QA testing; support systems etc. It occurred to us that since we had this in place, extending it to support more products for other developers (who didn't want to spend years on that themselves) would be easy. I didn't realise until much later that for a single company to be a developer, licensee, publisher, aggregator and reseller was unusual. It all seemed to make sense at the time!

I think the decision-making was always based around doing things where we could be experts and do a good job and stand out, rather than being yet another small and struggling developer in a larger market. Where we've added device and platform support, it's been by working out what we can support properly over time. The initial decision to support Windows Mobile after Palm was based on us coming up with a platform that let us develop the game once, and from there compile out for different platforms. We've had lots of questions about mainstream Java. We could have taken that route early on, maybe we would have done better, maybe we'd have vanished years ago.

Gameloft and EA both have phones as just part of a larger business. They will be working on their own titles as tie-ins between PC, console, and the various kinds of mobile. We haven't had problems getting licenses, perhaps because our focus has been different - we've aimed more at the casual market than the mainstream gaming market. Over the past couple of years we've worked much more on our own IP too.

In this case it's an acknowledgement by both companies that we can do better together than separately. It serves our interests well because we get to concentrate on games (which for me will be getting back to the most fun part of my work), and Handmark's interests because they get to have more content produced internally rather than it having to be licensed or outsourced, both of which can make projects less profitable.

Also as a small company selling from the UK to predominantly US customers, and exposed as we are to the dollar fluctuations, it helps us to avoid uncertainty by being part of a larger group with their base in the US. It means we can plan further ahead, and possibly embark on longer projects than we would do otherwise too.

We've looked over the years at the N-Gage and it hasn't made sense for us to support it specifically, although we are now working on adding Symbian to our platform list. Obviously there are a lot more S60 and UIQ devices to target than there are just N-Gage owners.

Android is very interesting, though it is Java-based, so our existing code (C/C++) won't just transfer. It isn't J2ME, so perhaps it might be as easy for us to migrate to as it is for more established Java houses. Right now it is an OS [Operating System] without devices, but I don't think it will be too long before that changes. We're keeping Android bubbling away in our research department.

While there have been a number of new iPod titles launched, the number isn't huge. I know that it makes sense for Apple to avoid saturating their market, but I think the market could have supported more titles, so I am left feeling that gaming has been an 'interesting experiment' rather than an 'important business' for Apple, at least so far.

Thanks to Howard for his time (and cool photograph), and we'll certainly be tracking what Astraware/Handmark gets up to in the future.