Jagex's Rob Smith: We want to test ourselves by bringing online games to mobile

Last week, Jagex announced annual revenues from its free-to-play MMOG RuneScape were £38 million ($58 million).

It also launched its second iPhone game, Star Cannon, onto the App Store and confirmed it would be releasing more iPhone and mobile games in 2010.

Clearly, the entry into the market of the UK's largest independent developer, has the potential to be a huge event.

So we caught up with COO Rob Smith to find out more.

Rob Smith: We're always keen to offer our games to the widest possible audience. We see the mobile space as an opportunity to not only reach a new audience of gamers but also to test our ability to deliver games across a variety of different platforms.

This is becoming a very competitive space which is driving development across all mobile platforms. This can only benefit gamers who have really taken mobile gaming to their hearts.

We feel that mobile gaming has excellent prospects at the moment and in the future. It's not our style to just sit back and analyse. We want to test and try games to see how successful they can be.

Our first iPhone game BounceDown was a real success with over 4 million downloads.

We choose to launch first on the iPhone because currently the technology has great penetration across our player base and Apple has developed a slick delivery channel with its App Store. This allows us to deliver our games directly to the users; although this is now also true of other mobile platforms.

The popularity of a game is down to how enjoyable and engaging it is to play, so levels of simplicity don't really affect its success. Some of the most popular games have very simple gaming mechanics and we see the iPhone market as quite casual. Our ambition is to develop and publish games that people will enjoy playing again and again.

With this announcement, Apple has clearly recognised itself as a significant player in the gaming market.

The level of scale that Apple will bring to this means the Game Centre will likely become the de facto platform for social networking within iPhone games, which should be a good thing for players, who will feel part of a wider community than ever before on this device.

Online gaming is our speciality and we will be bringing online games to multiple platforms in the future.

Jagex's ambition is to be platform agnostic and we are currently developing for mobile platforms as well as the PC.

There are some compelling opportunities on all mobile platforms and we have many ambitions beyond the iPhone for the future.

We feel the touchscreen technology in general is a new frontier for home computing.

At Jagex we are keeping a very close eye on this space as it certainly poses some great challenges which makes this an appealing prospect for our development teams.

You can find out more about Jagex via its games and corporate websites.