The short version of the pitch: The One is not an iteration; it’s a complete media overhaul.

“When you look at people who are watching media today … it’s a very dynamic world,” development director Boyd Multerer said during a panel discussion by Xbox team members. “We realized we had a real problem.”

Panelists described the console as starting from a “blank slate,” since the rise of both laptops and mobile devices as people’s preferred computing hardware happened after the Xbox 360 launched in 2005. Multerer said the company chose to start over rather than bank on the more advanced hardware in the Xbox One to carry it forward.

The biggest software-side change, as noted earlier, is the ability to use your voice to launch apps in tandem with one another (for example, to make a Skype call while you’re watching a movie). In other words, the Xbox One is competing with the “second screen” of phones or tablets by trying to give viewers the ability to multitask on their TV screens.

Basically, the One’s operating system is split into two sections: One resource-heavy partition for games, aimed at giving developers a predictable amount of power, and another partition running constantly in the background that can juggle multiple side apps for a “long period of time,” Multerer said.

Fellow panelist and Microsoft CVP Todd Holmdahl described the connected motion sensor, Kinect, as “completely redesigned from the ground up.” He said it has a 60 percent better field of view and the ability to detect much smaller objects, like fingers, which should make motion controls more accurate.

The Xbox 360 sequel will be Microsoft’s first completely new console — unless you count the 360 add-on Kinect, which few would — since 2005. Rumors abound about everything from its name (Xbox Infinity? Xbox 720?) to whether the new Xbox will require a consistent Internet connection, a long-running fan theory seemingly rebutted earlier this month by an internal email that Ars Technica said it has.

But the most important thing to remember is that for Microsoft this event is about much more than games. The company’s PR line is that the big reveal is about “a new generation of games, TV and entertainment.”

This is not a surprise. With more than 76 million of the consoles installed worldwide, non-gaming Xbox usage has been outpacing gaming usage since last March, growing 57 percent in the past year.

And last year at this time, we learned that the Xbox was the most popular video-playing gadget in the U.S., according to video ad company FreeWheel.

Then, at D: Dive Into Media in February, Microsoft’s entertainment and digital media president Nancy Tellem told AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka that the interactive original content Microsoft has been developing in a 125-person studio in Santa Monica could be released this year.

Some industry watchers have speculated that Durango and Sony’s PlayStation 4 could be the “last consoles,” but that narrative is a goose chase. “Console,” today, means something completely different from what it meant 20, 10 or even five years ago.

The thing to keep an eye on today, then, is how much of the planned one-hour presentation will be spent on games versus all the other forms of media that the new Xbox will be able to interact with and control. With game developers’ attention spans waning, it would not be out of the question for most of the show to be about the “TV and entertainment” parts of that PR line.

The unveiling event on Microsoft’s Redmond campus is scheduled to begin at 10 am PT (1 pm ET), and will be broadcast live on cable channel Spike TV and GameSpot’s channel on Twitch. AllThingsD will be in attendance and posting the news here.

And Animoca couldn’t be happier about that.

Co-founder Yat Siu calls them “fast food apps.” His 150-person company, a conglomerate of 12 smaller studios, has developed and published more than 350 apps, he said, currently at the rate of about four every week. Its goal is to one day crank out a new app every day as it expands its reach further into Asia and beyond.

Siu, who is also the CEO of Animoca’s parent company, Outblaze Ventures, said as much in a recent interview with AllThingsD. But he also had a lot more to say about the advantages of working outside of Silicon Valley, the maturation of Google’s Android ecosystem and why quantity is sometimes better than quality.

AllThingsD: What’s the difference between being based in Hong Kong and being based in Silicon Valley?

Yat Siu: In terms of our [Android] ecosystem, it is the dominant marketplace, whereas in the Valley, there’s a lot of focus on Apple. We don’t have that much venture capital available to us, so we have to focus on profitability and the bottom line very, very quickly. Our games aren’t all profitable, but our business is. And we’re just a small island city, so we do not have a domestic market. It’s go global or die.

How do your games fare in different regions?

When we first started [in 2011], the U.S. was our biggest market, but just because it had a larger ecosystem. That’s changing today. North America as a continent is now in second place to Asia because Japan and Korea are driving a lot of the revenues. … The people who are buying iPhones or Android phones in the U.S. today are not the first movers, whereas in Asia, a lot of the marketplace still has way under 50 percent smartphone penetration rates. In Japan, at the start of this year, it was under 30 percent.

Is Android fragmentation a problem for you? Putting most of your eggs in that basket means you’re dealing with phones that range from the very low end to the very high end, right?

Two years ago, we had a testing rack of 600 devices. Now, Samsung is outselling basically everyone else, except in China and Japan. The second thing that’s different now is that “low end” is no longer really “low end.” You used to have really poor devices with poor resolution and processing power. Even the so-called “cheap” devices that are sold in China today are quad-core or dual-core devices; they just cost $100, is all. And they’re all standardizing around Jelly Bean (the most recent version of the Android OS). The whole Android philosophy was, “Here, take the operating system. Do what you want. Good luck!” We had weird memory issues because people would be coding stuff on top. Now, with Jelly Bean, most of the stuff that’s going on in the operating system is going on in the application side.

Pretty Pet Salon is one of the more popular games Animoca has published, and started a “Pretty Pet” franchise.

Tell me about your games and how they perform. How do you evaluate success?

We look at every product as a gateway to another product. The key driver is popularity. Monetization will come, we think, once people are in there, but the ability to cross-promote to other games becomes important. We want to make sure that the user always has at least a few of our games to play, because we don’t believe that there is such a thing as a person who can play a game for years and years and years. It’s “fast-food apps.” People just want to consume quickly, move quickly and go on to the next thing. It doesn’t mean that they won’t come back to it, but they’re not prepared to invest console-style, sitting down and playing for four hours.

And if you spent $60 on a game, you’re probably going to invest a lot more time than if you spent nothing or spent 99 cents.

That’s true, too, definitely. But also, with mobile, whether it’s in trains or one-handed game time, sometimes it’s just when you’re lying in bed, the behavior that we’re seeing now is that a person is playing a game, and then after five minutes, he wants to move on to another game. He’s not necessarily playing the same game for an hour. He’s like, “I feel like something else.” It’s no different than people switching TV channels every once in a while, except they’re switching games.

So it’s not as much of a “hits-driven” business for you as it might be for others?

It’s all relative. What is a hit? Because it’s a global audience, a niche segment is pretty large. And yet, if you have a five-million-user niche, is that a hit? It’s probably a hit for an indie studio, but it’s not a hit for us because of the scale we operate in. Typically, we call anything a hit if it has over 15 million downloads, but as a franchise, as a series. We might have one app, and then if it does well and has a few million downloads and reasonable revenues, then we put sequels and additions on top of it. Out of the series, we may wind up having something like 20 or 25 apps.

For those games that aren’t sequels to existing games, how do your studios come up with new things to publish?

We have studios that are as small as six people. The producer is empowered to have his own budget and his own creative vision. There’s a weekly meeting where all the producers come together and talk about what they’re doing, and then go off and do their own thing. The advantage for the business is, if you start off with a studio of six people and it bombs, who cares? It’s not great for them, but the business can afford to do it. If they do well, they have a platform.

The independence of our studio is also attractive to our staff. They have the chance to be a startup without the startup risk. They don’t have to worry about payroll or finance, they can focus on the product and build their own team. The additional unintended advantage is that, in Hong Kong, we’re unique. So, if you want to do games and you want to publish your games, then, frankly, there’s nowhere else to go. People come to us because the other option is banking or finance — which is a good career, just not if you don’t like it. If we were in the Valley, we might end up getting slaughtered by the amount of recruitment and loss of staff. Who knows?

But it’s worth noting that you do also maintain an office here in San Francisco for non-game development roles like partnerships and PR.

In the past, the meccas of the global gaming space used to be different. They used to be Sony, Nintendo and, at one point, Sega. But it was never centered around Silicon Valley. That changed with the smartphone. Now the new mecca is the Bay Area, because Google Play is here and Apple is here. We have an office here because we have to pay homage to the new temples. Even though we’re not in the Valley, it’s absolutely required for us to go in. Every other app company that’s international that wants to succeed must do the same.

Almost all of your revenue, about 95 percent, comes from in-app purchases. Are you looking at other business models?

Advertising will come, but it is not dominant yet. Primarily, the buyers for that now are other app companies, and we’ve got our own network. If we focus more on our cross-promotion, we get more out of that than necessarily opening up inventory to everyone else. Right now, ads are generally low-quality, and they’re also spammy, so it’s a bad user experience. But that will change. The experience is there already — think about how much time you’re spending on mobile versus PC — but [ads] have to deliver value to the user. Facebook has the right idea. People who like casual games, you should really only show them other casual games. Today, the targeting doesn’t exist.

What does your conversion rate of non-paying to paying players look like? The typical curve has a lot of people at the bottom paying nothing or almost nothing, then a long tail with a bump at the end, composed of a small number of players who pay a lot.

That is the hardcore type of model, where basically you have a very low conversion rate, something like 2 percent, and a very high consumable model where people can spend thousands of dollars. That’s not our model. If you look at games like Pretty Pet Salon, you’d be hard pressed to spend more than 20 bucks, just because of the game play. We are expecting to have more volume of titles with a larger frequency of players coming in from outside. So, for instance, Pretty Pet Salon has an 8 percent conversion rate. Now, when we start working with Forgame (Animoca recently accepted a “strategic minority investment” from the Chinese hard-core game maker), that is different. We will listen to their suggestions, and it does appear that that will be the strategy, because people are prepared to spend that kind of money. It’ll be a learning experience for us.

If you haven’t heard of it, here’s the gist: You connect and swipe away rows of matching-colored dots to earn as many points as you can in 60 seconds. If you’re able to draw a square of dots of the same color, it’s like getting a raise on your birthday. You share high scores with friends — and by friends, I mean the Internet. And then you do it all over again. Immediately.

The iOS-only app, which was created by New York City-based Betaworks, has been downloaded more than two million times since it hit the App Store on May 1. Yesterday, I had the chance to catch up with the game’s creators, Patrick Moberg and Paul Murphy, to ask them about the inspiration behind Dots, who is playing the game — including a legion of “Dot-moms” — and what tips they can offer. Below are excerpts from our conversation:

Where did the idea for Dots come from?

Moberg: A lot of the early thinking was just looking at what was already out there, what was highly illustrated or cartoonish, and deciding we wanted to do something new, something that wasn’t out there.

But why dots? Why not coins, or squares, or birds flying through the air?

Moberg: Well, some of my inspiration for the design of the game actually came from the fine art world. I copied and pasted a bunch of fine art images from Google into my design documents and thought, if an app could be like fine art, maybe this would be it. But Dots was also inspired by board games. Old-school board games are fun and playful but have such — I guess the word would be neutral — such neutral personalities that anyone can approach them and play them.

You just crossed two million downloads on Tuesday. What are your engagement numbers like?

Murphy: It’s growing pretty well on its own, with very little marketing on our side. We’ve tracked that 100 million games have been played, so that means 100 million minutes, which is a lot of time. It probably doesn’t help the world with productivity. Every time somebody opens the app, they spend almost five minutes in there, and then tend to come back day after day.

At AllThingsD, some of us have this theory that Dots is a “mom” game. On Mother’s Day, I showed the game to my mom, who isn’t really into new tech or mobile games, and she couldn’t stop playing it. So I guess the question is, what does your audience look like so far?

Moberg: Yeah, my mom went to her Pilates class and said her friends kept telling her how addictive the game was. But she doesn’t have an iPhone. So now she’s thinking of buying an iPhone, so she can play Dots.

Murphy: But it’s not just moms. We started doing research on social networks and Instagram, and it seems a lot of young people are playing it, too. And we don’t have hard data, but we get a little bit of insight through the people that connect through Facebook. We know that it resonates heavily with women, but there are also a lot of men playing, too. So it’s really pretty broad right now.

What’s coming first, iPad optimization or Android?

Murphy: iPad. It’s not that we don’t love Android, but we got a lot of feedback right away from people that want iPad, and our instinct is to listen to the users. On Android it’s a little bit trickier because of the different strategies. One is, just make your app for Android, and the other is, build from the ground up, take advantage of all the features of Android, and we want to do the latter.

When will we see the iPad app?

Murphy: We’re aiming to do something by the end of the month.

You’ve also said that you want to make the app color-blind-friendly. What does that involve?

Moberg: Yeah, that’s something that will be in the next version, but we want to get it right. We want to make it so users can enable a color-blind mode within the existing app. It involves modifying the hue saturation, which is something we’re going to have to test with a lot of people first. It’s a fine line between useable and beautiful.

What are your highest Dots scores?

Murphy: I’m at 380, which is sort of lame. Patrick is — hold on, let me check — 472. He’s done a bit better, but he has access to the leaderboard, so maybe he’s made tweaks to his score.

Moberg: I feel like I’m not that successful at it. I have friends who score much better than I have. It’s a tricky thing. One of my friends compared it to spotting a pitch in baseball. When you see the initial board, you can see whether it’s going to be flush with squares, or even one step away from the initial square. Some people are just good at that.

What is the best tip you can give Dots players? (Readers: Also see this helpful guidebook, courtesy of Quartz.)

Moberg: Other than squares? Finding environments that you’re most comfortable playing in. I find that if I play on the subway when I’m trying to de-stress, it’s not the best. I’m just sort of playing to pass time. I play my best games when I’m home playing Dots with my girlfriend.

Murphy: I’m a big fan of the expanders, so whenever I accrue a lot of points I usually use them to buy a pack of expanders. If you use these at the right time, you can get more squares. The best time is usually at the start of the game.

Are Dots players actually making in-app purchases?

Murphy: People are buying dots, kind of to our surprise. We did want to make the game so people didn’t ever have to spend money and could earn dots just by playing, but also so you can spend a little bit of money and get those features right away.

How much money have you made through the app so far?

Murphy: We don’t really want to share that. But we are making money, so that’s positive.

Can we expect to see any ads popping up in Dots?

Murphy: It’s not in our road map. The game feels different from other games, and I think we’re going to try to preserve that. So we don’t have any ads immediately planned.

When you look at other mobile games that quickly became popular and then sort of fell off — Draw Something comes to mind — what do you think you can learn from that?

Moberg: Well, not to sound silly about it, but we’re testing some of the assumptions around how you’re supposed to do this for mobile games. That might mean the falloff still exists, or maybe this game won’t have that falloff. I don’t know. I think the key is optimizing for longevity instead of optimizing for mobile. When you look at old board games, there were no in-app purchases, right? And yet we’ve been coming back to them for years.

Murphy: The rule book would say, throw a bunch of ads at people’s faces right now! Jack up the prices in the game! And we don’t want to do that. We’re just sort of focused on the game experience.

The report, obtained in advance by AllThingsD, shows just how different the new generation of mobile games is from the gaming-only devices that previously reigned supreme. For context, back in Q4 2012, total consumer spending on games for iOS and Android devices surpassed spending on “gaming-optimized handhelds” (that is, Sony’s PSP and Vita, and Nintendo’s DS, DSi and 3DS).

But the real bombshell is in the new report, which covers Q1 2013: In that quarter, consumer spending on Sony’s and Nintendo’s handhelds declined significantly, while iOS and Google Play spending both increased, also significantly. Combined, the phone and tablet crowd spent nearly three times as much on games as handheld device owners.

(And bear in mind, of course, that a new 3DS or PS Vita game costs about $40, while even brand-new mobile games are typically free or 99 cents to download, with many offering optional in-game purchases.)

But wait, you say. This is the first quarter of the year, being compared to the lucrative holiday-driven fourth quarter. How is that fair to Sony and Nintendo?

Exactly. It’s not. With slower game production schedules and much lower device turnover, the holiday quarter matters a great deal to Nintendo and Sony. But for consumers with a steady stream of new games and newer, better devices on which to play those games, seasonality is mostly irrelevant.

IDC and App Annie’s numbers, then, amount to a double whammy: At both the best of times and the worst of times, new-school mobile games beat out their older counterparts.

A few other points of interest from the new report:

• The global install base for those “gaming-optimized handhelds” was about 200 million in Q1 2013. To put that in perspective, Gartner estimates that more than 2 billion phones and tablets are being/will be shipped this year alone. In other words, it’s through volume that mobile devices have closed and blown past the revenue-per-user gap.
• Although the total amount consumers spent on mobile games was far greater on iOS than on Android, gaming amounted to about 80 percent of all consumer spending on Android, vs. about 70 percent on iOS.
• The report splits consumers into four geographic zones: North America, Western Europe, Asia-Pacific and the rest of the world. For both Android and gaming-optimized handhelds, the Asia-Pacific share of total spending increased by more than 10 points (see the chart embedded below).

This report is the second such collaboration between IDC, which tracks videogame and entertainment hardware, and App Annie, which tracks mobile software and in-app revenue.

Now, some media companies whose mobile content gets a lot of traffic are considering arrangements with wireless carriers that would ensure their users can watch, surf and play as much as they want without being hit with stiff overage charges.

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Electronic Arts and The Walt Disney Corporation announced on Monday a new, multi-year licensing agreement, allowing EA to develop and globally publish games based on Star Wars, every nerd’s favorite franchise (Trekkies aside, that is).

“The magic of Star Wars is interwoven into the worlds, characters, planets and amazing battles. It is a universe that lends itself perfectly to gaming,” said EA Labels President Frank Gibeau in a blog post. “Our agreement unlocks a whole new future of Star Wars games that will span consoles, PCs, tablets, mobile and more.”

As you may remember, Disney acquired Lucasfilm last autumn for a whopping $4 billion, bringing into the fold all of the company’s properties — including LucasArts, the now-defunct gaming studio which Disney shut down a few months after acquiring Lucasfilm.

LucasArts was in the midst of developing a number of Star Wars titles when it was shuttered, including Star Wars 1313 — the Boba Fett-focused game currently in limbo — and Star Wars: First Assault. Disney said at the time it would instead be licensing the Star Wars properties out to other studios.

DICE and Visceral, two EA-operated studios, will begin to create new Star Wars games “spanning all interactive platforms,” while BioWare — the studio behind two of EA’s most popular Star Wars games — will also continue to develop games from the popular franchise.

Disney, the company said, will continue to hold certain rights for developing mobile, social and tablet-based Star Wars games.

“This agreement demonstrates our commitment to creating quality game experiences that drive the popularity of the Star Wars franchise for years to come,” said John Pleasants, co-President of Disney Interactive, in a statement.

“Q1 represented our largest three-month quarter of games revenue to date despite a 37 percent drop in year-over-year payments volume from our largest developer,” Facebook CFO David Ebersman said during the company’s earnings call. “Our other developers increased their payments volumes by almost 60 percent, and we saw record numbers of people playing games on Facebook.”

So even with a significant drop in revenue from its “largest developer” — the company formerly known as Zynga — Facebook still saw record game revenue and engagement. And that’s something of a sea change. Even as Zynga’s presence wanes, Facebook’s game offerings remain solid because other developers are rushing in to fill the gap — the Kings and Woogas of the world, for instance.

The California-based company, known for its educational-based LeapPad tablets for kids, has just introduced a new device aimed at helping youngsters learn to read and write.

Called the LeapReader, the pen-like tool reads audio books aloud and teaches basic writing skills, reciting letters and words aloud as the child is writing them. It will also offer games and other incentive-based learning tools.

If you’re familiar with LeapFrog’s product line, the LeapReader will remind you a lot of the Tag and Tag Junior audio pens. The Tag systems, however, are limited to electronic book-reading, and don’t include the writing tutorials, which LeapFrog says will offer a more complete learning solution.

The rechargeable device has an expected battery life of five hours and can hold up to 40 downloaded titles, available through LeapFrog’s library. LeapFrog says there will be 100 digital content audio titles — like audio books and trivia challenges — available by year’s end, including titles in the Clifford series, “The Velveteen Rabbit” and Little Golden Books. These range in price from $5 to $10.

The LeapReader itself costs $50, and will come to market in July. It supports English-language learning only. Oh, and there’s another cost to factor in: The LeapReader works with “interactive learning paper” and Learn to Write workbooks — about 35 to 42 interactive pages — that cost $20.

The company posted earnings per share of one cent on revenue of $264 million. Consensus on the Street expected Zynga to post a loss of four cents per share on revenue of $209.8 million. Still, that’s a decline of 18 percent year over year compared to the $321 million in revenue the company claimed in Q1 of 2012.

“2013 will continue to be a transition year as we face the challenging environment on the web and invest in developing the leading franchises and network across web and mobile platforms,” said Mark Pincus, CEO and founder of Zynga, in a statement, “and offer our 253 million monthly players a connected experience that can follow them from work to school to home and anywhere in between.”

The most important thing to note there is that 253 million monthly active users stat. It’s down from the nearly 300 million MAUs the company reported as of last earnings.

Also worth noting: Zynga’s daily active users — or DAUs — are at 52 million, an all-time low for the company.

“Users are migrating to mobile, and our marketshare on the Web is larger than it is on mobile,” Zynga chief revenue officer Barry Cottle told AllThingsD, in an interview. “As we look at it, it’s a natural part of the transition we knew was going to happen.”

“When we made the pivot last summer, the transition was happening really very fast, so we had to reorganize our studios quickly to move towards mobile,” Cottle said.

That’s why we’ve seen the closure and consolidation of some of Zynga’s outfits in areas like Maryland and Austin earlier this year, and why we’ll see the company shutter at least four more games in the coming year, focusing on games that are more geared towards a mobile audience.

“We made some decisions on a few Web games that we decided to shut down, which would have propped revenue up but wouldn’t have gone in direction we want to go in,” Cottle said. “It may have been a great short-term decision, but not good for us in the long-term.”

In February, Zynga was eager to remind everyone that nearly a quarter of its users — around 72 million of them — were accessing the company’s games via mobile devices on a monthly basis. Update 3:31 PT: The breakdown wasn’t apparent from the print, but Pincus stated on the conference call that Zynga’s most recent mobile MAU count is at 65 million. Again, that’s down from the 72 million reported last quarter, tracking with the dip in overall sequential MAUs.

“The good news is that we’re not nowhere. We’re sitting in a very nice place, in particular as it amounts to engagement,” Cottle said. “We’re seeing users spend 11.2 billion minutes per month playing our games.”

Shares of Zynga dropped to $2.93 in after-hours trading by 12.5 percent.

The key word, as CEO Pincus repeated on the call this afternoon, was “transition.” I imagine it more like the company saying, ‘we know we’re tanking right now — just stick with us.’

The Kyoto-based company reported on Wednesday that its net profit of 7.10 billion yen ($71.7 million) for the year ended in March, from a loss of ¥43.20 billion in the previous year. The result missed a consensus forecast for a ¥14.05 billion profit by 15 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters. The creator of Super Mario reported an operating loss of ¥36.41 billion for the 12 months, compared with a loss of ¥37.32 billion a year earlier, on revenue of ¥635.42 billion, down 1.9 percent.

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The Japanese videogame company said Wednesday that it is preparing new installments in its popular Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong franchises. Each of those games, which have long been exclusive titles produced for Nintendo’s devices, should help its products stand out during the holidays, the company said.

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“I’ve been evangelizing that BlackBerry is not a business device,” global gaming head Anders Jeppsson said. “It used to be, maybe, many years ago. But over 80 percent of our users are active consumers today, and they’re very, very social.”

In order to get to those users, though, developers must first be persuaded that porting games over to BlackBerry is simple and cheap. Naturally, Jeppsson said it is, thanks in part to the company’s open-source efforts on Github and the cross-platform social gaming tools provided by BlackBerry-owned Scoreloop.

Microsoft is also touting how easy it is for mobile developers to transition into its ecosystem, but — this is both a positive and a negative for Redmond — the discoverability gap versus BlackBerry 10 is huge. Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 are the newest members of a big family, including the proven powerhouse Xbox 360 and its accompanying Xbox Live Marketplace, not to mention Windows 8’s backward compatibility with innumerable PC games. Meanwhile, BlackBerry 10 is a nascent OS currently available on just one device, the Z10.

Efforts to bridge that device gap include some monetary incentives for BB10 developers, like the (now ended) “10K Commitment” that promised early-adopter devs up to $9,000 in free money if they couldn’t reach $10,000 in revenue in their first year on BB10. There’s also a first-mover advantage, Jeppsson added, because the OS is barely two months old. In other words, it’s easier for a game to break out on a non-Google and non-Apple platform because, at least for now, the pickings are slimmer.

Jeppsson said he’s been working on developer outreach since he came to Research In Motion in 2012, when RIM acquired Jeppsson’s user interface design company, The Astonishing Tribe. He claimed “many” developers are making more money with BB10 than they are on iOS.

But the devil’s in the details, and one of the biggest questions is, what proportion of BlackBerry 10 users are frequently playing games on their new Z10s? A company representative said she would try to find out last week, but did not respond to a follow-up request for numbers. (“Frequently” is important, because players who download games, open them once and never come back are near worthless for the free-to-play mobile developers that dominate the charts on other operating systems.)

Lack of specific numbers isn’t stopping Jeppsson from some good old-fashioned competition bashing when it comes to attracting developers from outside BlackBerry’s ecosystem.

“I think BlackBerry users are actually users that are willing to pay for quality content,” he said. “They expect a quality experience. They’re not going to sideload stuff and pirate it like Android [users], stealing software.”

However, he added that his newest goals are less about developer outreach and more about making the case that the consumer’s gaming experience is better on his side of the fence.

His hope is that, as phone hardware continually improves (“This is easily an Xbox One in terms of what it can do,” he said, holding up a Z10), users will be able to play the same games as consoles, so that a game started on the bus can be finished on the couch.

Again, Microsoft is preaching a similar message. But although it already has the console side of the equation worked out, its cross-platform games are more casual than the more complex hardware-constrained games Jeppsson aspires to pair with BlackBerry — or, indeed, run entirely on his phone.

“Why would you want to buy a big PC to play Counter-Strike, where you remove all the details anyway because you want 60 frames per second?” he said. “That’s how I play Counter-Strike.”