nDreams' Patrick O'Luanaigh

Based on my experience, my view is that it's very, very hard. Commercially there are a lot of big challenges now - advertising on Facebook is getting more expensive, the cost-per-click that you have to pay is getting higher. Unless you have a load of games, and the scale and size to do a lot of stuff, then it's difficult to get people to part with money - it's 3-5 per cent of people on average paying for stuff on Facebook.

In order to make money you need to have millions of players - not just hundreds of thousands - and that's hard without marketing and PR. The big guys, like Zynga, Playfish and Playdom have got to a stage where they can spend an awful lot of money on marketing - there are stories about Zynga spending $75 million per year on marketing... which I can believe. That gets you a lot of attention, a lot of players - and they've worked incredibly hard as one of the first people in. They've built on it, and got a lot of funding to develop that.

But for a small, independent player now it's very hard - and pretty much impossible to do on your own. We've tried some things out and we've found the biggest successes where we've worked with partners, with a brand that has a big Facebook following already, that can help bring a lot of players to the game.

At the moment we're taking what we're good at - making innovative, creative games with story and narrative - and trying to find partners to work with. That doesn't mean we're not still publishing, but I don't believe that to be a successful publisher and developer that you have to do everything yourself. I think that's the approach we originally took, but it's hard.

Marketing and PR particularly, and financing, can be challenging - we're getting through that. And we've made great learnings as well. For example, you've got to spend half your development budget after launch, which is something that's very different for developers - after marketing you end up spending just a quarter of what you've put aside actually on the game pre-launch, which is very unnatural.

So we've learned a lot, we're continuing to push the stuff we've got on Facebook - we think it's a very interesting area, but to be honest we're slightly down on Facebook, because it's proven a lot harder than we thought. Partly that's the fact that we came to it slightly late - a year or so after Zynga and Playfish had success.

That's a good question - I saw a great talk recently from Bigpoint, and if you look at the number of players they've got and the growth they've seen, you have to say that the wise money in many areas is Bigpoint's money. What they're doing is spending an awful lot of money on Google keyword advertising.

Facebook advertising does work, as long as you can get your money right - as long as your cost-per-click is less than the average amount you make per new player coming to your app, you're laughing. You just do more and more advertising, and make more and more money. It's just so hard getting to that stage.

As a developer who's publishing you either need to get a great marketing director and raise a nice budget, figure out the best way to do it, try lots of things and see what works. I spoke to Michael Action Smith from Mind Candy and he said they tried TV advertising, and found that it was really successful for them... whereas I'd have thought it was the last thing you'd want to do.

Or the other option is to go and find partners to help make it work - there's no harm in finding a great brand or company that has access to lots of eyeballs, maybe 1 million followers on Twitter or whatever. If you find people with that access, then use that relationship. Get celebrities on board to help promote the game.

Because if you've got a really good, creative idea but no marketing behind it then it's incredbly hard to get recognised by Apple and featured on the App Store, or whatever. The longer a platform lives... look at Facebook now, it's hugely crowded, and that makes it much harder - so if you can get into a platform early, then it could be great.

That's why I think we've had so much success in Home, because we were there early - so we're looking at new platforms now that we could potentially get in early on ourselves.