PomPom Games' Michael Michael

Yes, exactly. And it was the iPhone that did it. It just came out of nowhere. Nobody was even looking, and it's gone from nothing to being, I would say, the premium handheld games console.

The iPhone's certainly strange - no buttons is just weird. You've just got to change your games and the way you make them, I guess. I don't like iPhone games that have joysticks on the screen, for example. It's a touch-screen, make a game that uses that, and which doesn't need a joystick.

But as soon as we saw it, we knew that this Poppi idea we had would work for it. Poppi was a chance just to try and get those mechanics working on a touch-screen, because we knew once that was figured out we could start thinking about motion controllers and stuff like that.

It's difficult. They're all becoming a little bit shuttered, but if you were a small developer and you have a really solid concept, you're probably better to take it to a publisher, and get them to approach a platform holder with it. I don't think people like Microsoft will even listen to you unless you've got a publisher these days.

But then, Microsoft has created the Indie Games, a new layer beneath Arcade. And I imagine Sony will probably follow along with that at some point. But that upper layer, the Live Arcade, and PSN layer? I wouldn't recommend that any small developer have that in their mind for their game. It's just not a great idea. God, this sounds so negative!

It's an interesting platform. It's certainly easier to get your games on it, and it's still a fresh market. If the news breaks out that a studio made a game for Indie Games and it made a lot of money, I think a lot of the bigger boys will start looking at that channel. It just cycles through, ultimately. As soon as you have some success on any channel, the big guys will start looking at it, and the whole thing repeats.