RedLynx's Tero Virtala

It's certainly a new opportunity when we think about game design and our core development people are still in-house. Most of our ideas for design come from inside the company. In a way we have to think like gamers and if we think a feature would be really good in game the we prototype it, and we have to trust our people. But then there are a number of things we don't know for sure and it seems like a good idea, so we put it out there and gather the data and the metrics. There's a lot of statistics and a lot of data and we're not always sure we know what we're looking for but when you have something new out there and we start following how people use it, at times we see what we're expecting and other times we learn something new that we didn't expect. And then we have to ask is there an opportunity, is there a development need, is there a possibility for something new?

Trials HD has been a big hit for us and the total amount of leaderboard users is over 900,000 now. The amount of unique players is getting close to one million, which is pretty good. We create new videos, we promote tracks that users have built, we run a lot of competitions. So we feed the game and we can see from comments on websites that the users really like that and it's our responsibility to support the game and the user-created content is a really good way to promote the game and bring in new users.

In the online space if people like your game, your product, your service, they can start promoting it to their friends. In the end people appreciate the fact that if you're releasing the game it isn't just a one off and we continue to monitor and support it, we listen to the players, we're gamers ourselves so we appreciate their feedback. Eventually that becomes a snowball that keeps on growing and growing. In the online world you definitely can't control everything but you can do a lot of things to make sure people are talking about your game.

We haven't yet detailed what games we're working on but as we've said there are eight titles coming out this year. A couple of those are for the online console space and there are many games for iPhone and one for the PC online space. One thing that we are definitely doing is making sure the Trials community is still served. It has been a big success for us, players have liked the game and we're still trying to be active with the market.

In the end the most important thing is to think about the end user, and the quality of the game has to be good for them. So yes, there is a lot of content on the App Store but why release something that isn't that good? If it's cheap and starts off well, it won't stay at the top for long because in this world you need users to recommend your game to other users. We think we have the skills to make games that really stand out. The online space requires different types of marketing efforts. We have specialised PR and marketing director and a team that are thinking about that all the time. It's not traditional PR and marketing, it's serving the gaming community and making them aware of really high quality and well priced games. You simply need to be systematic and put effort into that, especially in the iPhone space and the Facebook space as well. The barrier to getting a game on those platforms is so low that if you approach it with the traditional developer point of view that you release a game, put it out there and leave it, people won't find it. So there has to be a completely different type of approach. It simply holds true that on the iPhone it's not just about games, it's also a service.

I don't think we'll have that type of portal. We've learnt a lot in the online space and we think there are certain features and ways how we can really serve our user base, so we're developing ideas. But on the other hand in today's connected world there are so many good partners that you can work with it's better to build and be part of those important ecosystems and networks and provide something good for our partners and benefit from that ourselves. We don't need to own the communities, we just need to serve them as best we can. We're certainly going to develop our partner network further