Four Door Lemon's Simon Barratt on why backing Windows Phone 7 is no big quiz

Aside from the standard battle between the big smartphone platforms, there's also an entirely different war going on almost under the radar - the war between the various social gaming networks.

The launch of Game Center on iOS upped the anti somewhat, with previous independent networks on iPhone having expanded their base to Android as a result.

Windows Phone 7, however, will come with its own ready-made network from day one, complete with millions of users carried over from Xbox 360.

We caught up with Four Door Lemon's MD Simon Barratt to ask why he thinks Xbox Live integration will benefit the platform as the studio prepares to launch it first Windows Phone 7, iPhone hit QuizQuizQuiz.

Pocket Gamer: How did you get involved with developing for Windows Phone 7?

Simon Barratt: We met up with the Microsoft guys at Develop Brighton and we were impressed with what we saw with the platform. They seemed keen to work with us as well and it’s been a pretty good experience.

What is the platform like to work with? Any particular strengths or weaknesses?

It's fairly well known that the platform is primarily C# based for development which is a bit of a change from us coming from a pure C/C++ development background - even with iPhone we tend to stay in C++ for 90 percent of our code.

We've not ported our multi-platform engine across to C# yet, so we’ve been using frameworks already available in the Windows Phone 7 tools rather than our own. This has worked pretty well though.

Looking at the launch titles that Microsoft is working on it seems that they're very keen on pushing Windows Phone 7 as a gaming platform.

With QuizQuizQuiz we feel we've got a very strong product in a particular niche genre and hopefully having worked closely with Microsoft it will do well at launch and beyond.

Xbox Live is a powerful network for them to link directly into, so it will be interesting to see how well integrated this is in some of the launch titles. Game Center is obviously just getting started, too.

If Xbox Live users and Windows Phone 7 consumers are an overlapping market, it will certainly mean a lot more people are already registered on Microsoft's gaming network.

Programming languages aside, the platforms are pretty evenly balanced from a developers point of view right now - the main difference is the state of the app store ecosystems.

Windows Phone 7 is going to be a bit of an unknown for the first few months, but once it settles down we should have a good idea of Microsoft’s standing.

The actual hardware going into all these devices now is very similar. That means that if apps are available cross-platform, consumers aren’t going to be missing out on anything, which is good.

Do you think the smartphone market is becoming overcrowded?

I think once the APIs for these platforms have settled down, the main headache for smaller developers will be managing the submission and approval side of all the various stores.

One update for a simple bug fix is a big logistical challenge in terms of going through the various store interfaces and approval processes.

Any more plans for Windows Phone 7?

We're hoping to move some of our other projects across in the near future. We've got big hopes for QuizQuizQuiz on the platform, and the success of that could mean that we’ll be speeding up that process.

Thanks to Simon for his time.

You can keep up to date with Four Door Lemon via its website.

QuizQuizQuiz is due to hit Windows Phone 7 shortly, while You Are The Ref version 1.1 has just hit iPhone with Game Center and AGON support.