And why mobile is the next frontier.
With more than 160 million registered users, Bigpoint is a force in the online gaming world. Its browser-based games are attracting around 250,000 new players a day.
Now it's setting its sights on mobile, with plans to port some of its most popular games to iPhone, iPad and Android in 2011.
Meanwhile, one new game - Toon Racer - will be Bigpoint's first to launch simultaneously across web and mobile devices.
"We believe that it shouldn't be the problem of the gamer where he can access a game," says COO Nils-Holger Henning.
"Whether he's playing on his iPhone, iPad or Google phone, he plays against the same users, independently from which platform they access the game."
Besides Toon Racer, Bigpoint plans to mobilise several of its most popular titles in the first half of 2011, including Farmerama and Zoomumba, which online regularly attract more than one million concurrent users according to Henning.
Why go mobile now? He explains that Bigpoint feels the time is right, not least because on iOS in particular, the billing infrastructure is in place to make it possible.
"We use the virtual item-selling business model through all of our games, rather than pay-per-download or subscriptions," says Henning. "This space is ready for us now."
He also cites the growth of smartphones and the availability of bundled data tariffs as key factors in Bigpoint's decision to go mobile. It's also part of a wider cross-platform expansion, with the company also targeting connected TVs and set-top boxes.
Making virtual items work on iOS is easy enough, but Android is more complex.
However, Henning says Bigpoint is hardly daunted by the prospect of working with different in-app billing technologies around the world for Google's OS - it already has 150 different payment systems integrated into its online games.
After iOS and Android, then what? Henning says Bigpoint is evaluating other smartphone platforms, including Windows Phone 7. However, it seems non-Apple tablets are higher on the agenda.
"We are talking to hardware manufacturers and directly developing games to test them on prototypes," he says. "We'll have some announcements in the first quarter on this."
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