Four years ago Affinity games was one of the leading lights of UK mobile game development.

Along with the likes of Morpheme, Iomo, Kuju, Rockpool, Hailstorm, Ideaworks3D, Elite and Distinctive, it worked on projects for a clutch of publishers, while pushing out a steady flow of its own original IP too.

Fast-forward to the present, however, and Affinity is no longer involved in mobile, preferring instead to concentrate on games for Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network. In a frank Q&A with ME, managing director Brian Rodway explains why...

Brian, what went wrong?
There just aren't any routes to market for us any more. There are fewer publishers than ever, and they've all got their own developer teams. The D2C market has completely crumbled. There is a viable business in simple branded games if you've got enough of them. But the problem there is the cost base. It's impossible for Western developers to compete with firms from Eastern Europe, India and elsewhere.

What was the final straw?
We did a word search game that we developed and published ourselves, although we used a partner to get distribution in some territories. It was a good game and did well, around 100,000 downloads. So we did Word Search 2, with extra features like 'SMS to a friend'. We went to all these publishers with what we thought was a good proposition – a game with a track record and cool innovations. No one was interested.

Why?
I think it was because there was no brand attached. There’s no space for the middle ground in mobile now. Publishers want a massive brand that will either be huge or completely flop.

What did Affinity do after mobile?
We switched to the new casual console formats like PlayStation Network and Xbox Live. All the skills we learned in mobile apply there, but we can actually make money because it's a specialist environment and we're not competing with Call Of Duty and the rest. Also, there's no fragmentation and you get to keep 60 per cent of revenue rather than 25 per cent.

www.affinitystudios.co.uk

To read Part One of our Game Developer Special, click here.