Bigpoint's Nils-Holger Henning

The typical American things that we take care of – good health insurance, social insurance packages, looking after sickness and covering staff for illness. We are have a more European approach regarding holidays. We're not French, about it [laughs], we don't shut down, but we make sure our staff can relax with holiday time. We're open in saying people should take their time off, we have company events. It's much easier when you have a smaller company like our US office, especially compared to our Hamburg office.

As you say browser-based gaming is huge. But as we spoke earlier there are big localisations issues, cultural specialities and the like that we have to be really careful with. Right now in Asia we couldn't be half as successful as we are in the Western world because their approach in terms of graphics, design, landing pages, gameplay is different. Asian games tend to have PvP and they want to really challenge others online constantly. It's different with game mechanics and the many Korean games that are licensed for Europe tend to have a much younger style and market. So right now the US is at the top of our target list, along with Europe and Eastern Europe. Asia will be a topic for 2011 and 2012. We will really dedicate ourselves to the market and at the moment we are operating games in China, Japan and Korea.

We've had some success, it went break-even but we cannot scale it like we did in the West. We've had our game, Seafight where players are pirates and that's been fine in Europe. But we were wondering why it's not really spun off successfully in Asia, and our Chinese partner said "we want to change all these neon colours, drop the pirate boy and use a pirate girl with big boobs." And the registration went straight up. And if we had that in Europe we'd have a horrible conversion rate in terms of registrations, it's as simple as that.

There's a couple of things. We're growing daily between 200,000 and 250,000 new sign-ups. That's a minimum growth rate that we've got right now. Bigpoint.com is one of the most popular websites in terms of gaming in the whole world. But we also understand very well that we can't handle it on our own because we get so much traffic. We realised that we needed to develop more content. So we're developing content based on intellectual property, as we're doing with Battlestar Galactica and a couple of others to be announced. We worked more and more with external developers and external games companies by publishing their games. And we also have the competency to get product from others and open up our API. We opened up the Bigpoint API so that as a small developer you can upload your game to the Bigpoint Development Lounge and you can connect to our registration system and we can directly send over users. You can also integrate our payment system and if at a certain point you want to work closer with us you can use our internal resources like localisation, management hosting, community support and all of these little elements. We do this very fairly and we tell developers we can do this without any kind of exclusivity, they can distribute how ever they like to the market and we don't want anything – let's just test it out. If it begins to take off then of course we'll call them and get to work closer. For us on the one hand it's a kind of talent screening tool and on the other we're sharing our traffic with third-party developers.

They're pleased. They don't get their email addresses but they practically get our user base. We obviously have to be careful in terms of data protection, but yes, they get access to the users and for them it's perfect. A small developer that creates a game but doesn't yet know how to drive traffic, to monetise and get everything done – they don't have to risk their own money. They can plug it into Bigpoint and see if it works.

I can tell you we have fifteen projects that have gone live and we have right now over 200 developers of games who have signed up for it and will probably launch, or are in the process of launching a game.