Location-based mobile games publisher Red Robot Labs is planning to invest $2m to support titles made by other developers using its R2 platform.

The US-based company has announced three new companies working on the platform: Box of Robots, ShortRound and 50 Cubes, taking its total to five.

Red Robot Labs also makes its own games: the mafia-themed Life Is Crime came out last year, and has generated “millions of downloads”, although for now, the publisher is staying mum on how that translated into revenues. It will unveil its next first-party game later this month.

The company is certainly ambitious. “This is our first step towards our goal of becoming the Steam of mobile,” says CEO Mike Ouye. “There is a huge pool of talented game developers, who developed for consoles and social games that have approached us with awesome location-based game ideas.”

The challenge with location-based mobile gaming is that many of the hits have tended to burn brightly then fade away. Life Is Crime isn’t in the Top 200 Grossing Games on the US App Store, for example (caveat: it’s also on Android) although rival Booyah’s My Town 2 is currently in 78th spot.

Still, Red Robot Labs has funding to try to change this: the company raised $8.5m in September 2011 to further its ambitions.