Smartphones may be getting smaller every year, but the gaming app market is growing every week. That’s why small game developers like Venan Entertainment are pretty confident about showing their latest game, Ninjatown: Trees of Doom!, at E3 despite being surrounded by the looming giants of the console game companies.

Game development for the mobile device market wasn’t always as strong as it is now. Many long-time mobile developers tell horror stories of having to program across a wide range of often-incompatible phone platforms with wildly varying hardware feature sets. Once the company completed their games, they often found themselves lost in the different provider certification programs, only to end up with a product that was, in the end, hard to find for the average phone owner.

That environment changed dramatically with the rise of modern app platforms like those running on the iPhone and Android smartphones. This reduces the number of times the developer has to rewrite their game code for different platforms and spend more time optimizing their game’s performance, which is always welcomed by gamers looking to get the best game on the limited hardware smartphones provide.

The rise of these new mobile platforms also brought the concept of the “app store” into the equation-- Something that’s increased the sales results for these smaller developers by leaps and bounds. From the gamer’s perspective, app stores make it easier to find mobile games by gathering them all through a single source for easy payment and installation. Even though most mobile games are priced at less than $5, the wider world audience brought by the app stores leads to more games being sold otherwise. For example, Little Worlds Studio, which made the trip to E3 from France, sells their Color Cross game for $1.99 on the app store.

From the game developer’s perspective, app stores make it easier to concentrate their limited marketing budget, while also reducing the costs of deployment by not requiring the developer to maintain servers for game downloads.

The widespread success of these new mobile platforms has brought a wider variety of games as well. Mobile developers like NimbleBit Games have been more willing to take the risk of trying new and unique gameplay ideas, such as with their spinning frog jumping game, Dizzypad . Thanks to the shortened development time and smaller budget of mobile titles, and if one title fails to deliver sales, it’s often made up by sales of the company’s next title.

The growth of the mobile gaming market doesn’t end there, however. The newly released iPad from Apple, and the future of Android-based tablets means that these mobile game developers will very quickly find their market expand even larger than it has with smartphones. The increased size of the tablet screens and improved hardware mean developers can release more detailed versions of their games, like Phil Hassey’s Galcon Fusion, based off his original iPhone real-time strategy hit, Galcon.

From talking with the mobile game developers here at E3, it really does seem that the best way to make it big is to start off small.