Bigpoint's Heiko Hubertz

Yes, that's absolutely right. In 12 months, maybe 18 months the prices will be more realistic and then we can look at buying more companies. But that doesn't mean we don't want to acquire now. We're also acquiring companies with a realistic valuation, and there are still companies out there, we're talking to many of them.

In the traditional games industry, in the boxed industry, there are developers who are really struggling and they are not asking for high valuation, they are just asking for survival. We're looking exactly for these kind of developers because when it comes to high quality 3D games they have the experience. We can just give them another engine, they don't need to use the Xbox or PlayStation technology, they can use our web technology. They can still develop the same quality of game it's just for a browser.

No, they are too closed. And we are also developing games across platforms. So we are developing games to be played across the iPad, iPhone and PC. The main area for us is browser and mobile. We will launch our first game that is totally cross-platform this year.

Cross-platform is the next big thing. The user would like to play a soccer game, a sci-fi game or a farming game whenever he wants. If he's playing FarmVille on Facebook and goes on a road trip and wants to play a farming game on his iPhone he'll just download another farming game. You're losing your user because you don't have products across platforms. That's exactly why we want to develop all of our games across a number of platforms. We're not talking about different games. We're talking about the same game, with same user access, the same database, log-ins the exact same as they would be on the browser as they are on the iPhone.

We don't feel the pressure, we really thrive off that. Because over the past couple of years we have established our free-to-play and browser games business. Now with the support of big companies like Electronic Arts who are also entering the same market the users believe more and more and trust the products more and more. It helps to establish a business model for the future.

On the other side, we are talking to these companies and we offer them our support to get access to our payment solutions and out platforms and learn how to reach and promote an online game. We will announce later this year a couple of our co-operations with some big players in the market, where we support them by publishing their online games.

In a way. Developers are aware that they can create games for the iPhone or for the browser and it's cheap, so there's a lot of chances for a lot of independent developers. But they all have one problem - they need users. And that's why they come to us and we don't ask them to sign an exclusive deal. People come to Bigpoint to work with us because they can also work with Facebook or others. For developers it's a huge opportunity to be more independent and not just rely on the EA's and Ubisoft's of this world.

I try to spend a lot of time there. We have around 20 people there and we want to get that up to 60-80 people. So we really want to hire more people, especially in development. We really believe in local content and developing games for the US market in the US market. We have a team working already on the first title.

We're not 100 per cent sure now what is the US taste. Our games may have to look different and feel different but we think it makes absolute sense to develop games with local people so we're not hiring any Europeans for the US, we're not transferring Germans to do the job, we're going after American's to develop the games for us.