It's been a little over six months since Sydney-based studio Nnooo (pronounced No) released its debut title Pop alongside the launch of Nintendo's WiiWare service. GameSpot AU recently spoke with Nnooo creative director Nic Watts to see how successful the game was, what the challenges were in bringing a Wii game to the iPhone, and what the future holds for the Nnooo team.

　　We hear you've partnered with EA Japan to distribute Pop. Why is that?

　　Japan is a really different market. For us to work with Nintendo Japan, you have to have a Japanese office, which requires a registered business. You also have to be able to speak fluent Japanese. Working with EA in Japan was just so much easier because they just took the game and localised it and published it there for us.

　　Can you tell us how much it cost to make Pop?

　　The development costs were approximately A$100,000.

　　GS AU: Has Pop turned profitable yet? If so, how long did it take?

　　NW: Yes, it broke even in about June/July sort of time. Since then, we've been in profit. We're not allowed to release sales figures on it unfortunately because of the way Nintendo's licensing agreement works.

　　GS AU: Why is it do you think that some indie developers are having trouble making money off Wii/Xbox Live Arcade/PlayStation Network titles?

　　NW: I think the hardest part is definitely marketing. iPhone [applications] are the same. We've just released Pop on the iPhone and there's like 10,000 applications out there. Trying to compete and trying to get coverage is really hard. It's the same with WiiWare, XBLA and PSN; getting people to notice it. I think it's also that we're in that transition of changing from disc-based sales of games to online. Particularly if you buy a Wii, 360 or PS3, the consumer knows that they have to buy discs to get games. There's less, but not necessarily all, consumers who know that they can go online to get the same games as well as new and different games. I think that's the really hard thing.

　　I also think a lot of people (and it's really taken me by surprise) [that don't realise] how much marketing and PR you have to do to get people to be aware of your game. At first, I just presumed that you'd just make a game that people would love and rave about it on websites and then you'd get sales. But you actually have to be quite active for people to be aware of it.

　　GS AU: Pop was brought out on the iPhone just before Christmas. Do you have any statistics to see how well it's going?

　　NW: Not really. We've got day-to-day sales, but we haven't got anything concrete because we don't get the full stuff until the end of the month, because they've not issued it yet. It's been OK, but it'd definitely not been as good as the WiiWare launch for us.

　　GS AU: Why do you think that is?

　　I think it's just down to the sheer volume of apps. There are also the small frustrations with the App Store--each platform has its own little frustrations--but it's very difficult for us to control release dates. When we submit a product to Apple for approval, they approve it and the day they approve it is the day it's stamped as its release date. Say it was approved on the first of January and we've changed the launch date to the 10th of January. When it comes out on the 10th, it would still say the first as the release date. What that means is it pushes it right to the bottom of the "What's New" list on the 10th.

　　Pop became profitable in June/July last year.

　　GS AU: How different is iPhone development to WiiWare?

　　NW: It wasn't too bad actually. We decided because the environment you program in for the iPhone is quite different to WiiWare, we tried to do it from the ground up. Apple has quite a strong history in writing operating systems, the operating environment is really robust, so it didn't take us long to get things up and running. There were different technical hurdles--obviously you're dealing with the touchscreen and it's a much smaller device that you've got to deal with. So you've got to deal with legibility and things like that. Because it's a portable device, we really spent a lot of time making sure that it worked well with a lot of the iPhone and iPod features in it.

　　For example during play, you can listen to your iPod and keep playing it, rather than just playing the game music. A lot of iPod and iPhone games what they do is they kill the iPod music when the game starts and plays their own music. We didn't want to do that. If they're playing on their iPod, they clearly want to be listening to their own music rather than music we're going to force them to listen to. We detect what's going on and play the appropriate music if they're not listening to their music.

　　GS AU: Does the smaller screen of the iPhone mean that you've had to sacrifice anything to get it onto the platform?

　　NW: Not really, we're quite lucky that because Apple has put quite decent resolution screens onto the iPhone and iPod touch, we can get quite sharp graphics on it. We've had quite a few compliments about how good the graphics are for the game. Obviously it's a smaller resolution than the Wii, but because it's pretty much the same, we can almost have the same number of bubbles and movement as on the WiiWare one. I don't think we've had to sacrifice much actually, I've been really happy with it.

　　GS AU: How does the certification process for iPhone apps compare to the certification process for the Nintendo Wii?

　　NW: iPhone is definitely a lot easier, which is why there's a lot more apps out there of varying quality. For Nintendo, one of their big things is they want to make sure that everything passes a very large series of tests. The other reason is because Apple have got a lot of experience in the operating system side of things. They make sure that anything they want the device to do is put in the operating system. If a call comes through and you're playing Pop it's going to kill it. We basically get sent a message saying "your application is going to die in this many seconds", so it's up to us to deal with that, or not. Whereas on the Wii, there's an awful lot of things that you have to integrate yourselves, which is a part of the Nintendo user-experience, like the home menu and things. What that means is it pushes out how much testing you have to do. Rather than having the home menu integrated on an operating system level, it's integrated more on a per software level, which means there can be a lot more little issues there that Nintendo wouldn't like.

　　Nnooo is planning to port Pop to the DSiWare.

　　GS AU: The input method of the iPhone is almost identical to that of the Nintendo DS. Why haven't we seen an NDS port of Pop?

　　NW: [Laughs] Funny you should mention that. We're looking into the DSiWare stuff. One of the big things for us as a small company is that downloadable products are really suited to our business model, because we can control everything from concept to release and can control the quality. When we work with publishers, and we've worked with EA and it was a really great relationship, it's obviously that little bit more difficult because you've got an extra link in the chain. They may want different features that they'd like as opposed to what you'd like. We've really tried to maintain control. With the DS being a cartridge-based system, we would have had to work with a publisher to get it out there and pressed onto cartridges. Also, from a price perspective, I wasn't fully convinced that Pop at a cartridge-based price was really feasible.

　　GS AU: Both of your previous titles seem to revolve around the Pop franchise. Will Nnooo be working on anything different in the not-too-distant future?

　　NW: Yeah, that's our hope. As far as I'm concerned I want Pop on the DS to be the last version of Pop, at least for a very long time. We've already had (myself and one of my colleagues) a very big brainstorming session just before Christmas. We've got about three or four game ideas that we want to bring out and we just came up with a new one which we might work on first. It's more multiplayer-orientated--that's something we want to start working on hopefully on the iPhone sometime in the next month or so. If things go well, we'd like to put it on the DS and WiiWare as well.

　　GS AU: Given the studio's recent success, will you be looking at expanding the team?

　　NW: That's something we'd definitely like to do and we're always looking for good members of staff, particularly programmers. If there are people out there who've got talent, they should definitely get in contact. In terms of growth, we don't want to grow exponentially, because a lot of studios do that, then they go through real problems and have to let a lot of people go, then they grow again and then have to let people go again. We want to just try and manage our growth sensibly, so that we ramp up each project and keep our staff and make sure we're always sort of sustaining our growth, rather than just spurts then dying.

　　GS AU: Nic Watts, thanks for your time.