Dublin - For young Irish entrepreneur Dylan Collins, playing video games is a serious business.
In just three years, the 27-year-old Dubliner's start-up company, DemonWare, has become the global games industry's supplier of choice for software that allows multiple players to compete simultaneously over the Internet.
Widespread interactive gaming
This growing phenomenon - demand has doubled over the past five years according to industry figures - has been fuelled by the advent of new-generation game consoles such as Microsoft's Xbox 360, which lets the user go online.
"We're in a pretty good position, but we've been lucky," the fresh-faced and straight-talking Collins told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.
"We were last into the market, but we were coming in with the newest technology just as the tide was turning and all the developers were really starting to embrace online."
Collins, a finalist in Ireland's 2006 Entrepreneur of the Year Awards, and fellow Trinity College Dublin graduate Sean Blanchfield set up DemonWare in 2003 and embarked on a tour of games studios to find out what publishers needed.
"We signed our first customer a year later, and from there we took on the other companies in the sector."
DemonWare's clients include ActiVision, which makes games including Call Of Duty, X-Men and Doom, Ubisoft, Sega Holdings, Codemasters and THQ.
"If you look at the biggest games coming out this Christmas - Call of Duty III, Splintercell, Smackdown - they're all using our technology for the online stuff," Collins said.
Shortage of talent
The company, which licences its products on a one-off, per-title basis rather than by charging royalties, broke even in 2005 and will be profitable this year on a turnover of several million euros, Collins said.
"Our margins are around 15 to 20 percent net, which isn't bad," he added.
The company, which has fielded several takeover enquiries to date, is exploring options including mobile phone technology - "much trickier than gaming" - and online advertising channels.
"The bottom line is we have investors, and investors need a return, so at some point in the future something will happen to give them that, and there's a number of ways out," he said.
"It depends what angle of attack you want to take. There's also a number of little companies out there that are interesting in terms of acquisition possibilities."
DemonWare currently employs 18 people between its offices in Dublin and Vancouver and plans to hire at least four more next year - a task made difficult by the arrival in Ireland of Internet search engine giant Google.
Google, which opened a base in Dublin in 2004, said last month it was expanding its Irish workforce by 500 to 1 300.
"All the good people have been hired by Google - and I mean all of them"
"What we're seeing lately, particularly in anything related to web development, is that all the good people have been hired by Google - and I mean all of them," Collins said.
"It's great that they're here, but they're absolutely draining the market. There's not enough good people to go around, and that's going to be a problem for the future. " - Reuters