Frima's Steve Couture and Jake Theis

Space Shooter was 8-12 people depending on the timing of the project. What we're doing in service is still today bigger than what we're doing with our own IP. We've developed some really big casual MMOs for kids - the Build-A-Bear Workshop is a big project, we've worked for them for four years now. We built the initial MMO then the real work starts with the maintenance with them, which we've been doing for a long time. That's a big project and you if look at the total investment, it's huge. We worked on The Littlest Pet Shop Online with EA and Hasbro, that was a really big project too. So we have these large projects in terms of service. Build-A-Bear is 20 million customers and it's doing well so we've made less investment elsewhere.

The way we see it, instead of putting all of our eggs in one basket we try to build little IPs and see the reaction in the market and then expand on it. Something that is a good example is A Space Shooter - it's going to be ported out to between 6-8 platforms by the end of the year. Our other title, Zombie Tycoon, we launched a year ago and it's not had such rapid success but the game and the concept, they way that we present it, it's been really appreciated by the players.

And then Pocket God has been our first foray into Facebook. We worked with Bolt Creative who made the iPhone version and it was a top five to top twenty game. We loved the IP and thought it was very interesting, bringing a mobile concept and a mobile brand to Facebook was a compelling opportunity, something that we certainly don't think we'll be the last company to attempt. Taking that and massaging the game mechanics so it works with Facebook, so it has virality, so it has strong retention with people checking in multiple times on it... it's been doing really well, we're about nine weeks in and we're 200,000 monthly active users or in that range. I would qualify that by saying we haven't spent a dollar of marketing against it yet, we're still in beta. We're excited to see the engines turn on shortly once we have everything in place.

We had an interesting conversation two days ago about the people that dedicate themselves to one platform, when new platforms come along they are walling themselves off from fantastic options. Who would have thought a few years ago that tablets would have taken off the way in which they have? Or four or five years ago that Facebook would take off for games - those options didn't exist. We want to make sure when we're launching intellectual property we're not confining ourselves and we're able to take the best opportunity at any given time.

And we have a big team so we can specialise with people. We understand different business models and work-for-hire is a good opportunity to understand the markets. When you work for big clients you see the mechanics.

It's kind of like working in a seesaw fashion, where sometimes the client project is first and our first foray into a platform - they're excited and we're excited. And sometimes we'll go in with the IP first and open it up, and our business development guys will see their phones start to ring, "we saw your iPad game, we didn't know you did that, let's do something." It's intriguing.

Over the next couple of years we want the IP to become our main revenues generator so we'll have to expand a lot more. It's still 90 per cent of our revenue, from servicing and work-for-hire. We want to build the IP portion slowly and quietly.

It's not a question of the total amount of employees, it's the amount of people we want in one single set-up. To get to 300, it's a huge team to have in one single location, so for sure we're looking for acquisition to expand our company in different territories.

We're already present in the United States and we want to grow our IP side of the business. The kind of acquisition, it's not totally based on the geographical thing but more on IP and expanding our catalogue, that would be interesting. Producing videogames in Quebec it's super-nice. We have good incentives with tax credits, R&D tax credits, there's some programmes to create new IPs and things like that, and there's talent.

In the province of Quebec we have this strange culture that's between American culture and European culture. So we're watching HBO and listening to French singers. We're in the middle of that and it gives us a culture of creation for an international market, or at least a European and American market.