After establishing itself as one of the most successful independent iPhone game developers, Firemint gained a strong early foothold on the young iPad platform with HD versions of its major iPhone hits Flight Control and Real Racing.
Those games have been regular presences in the iPad best-sellers charts since their launch, cementing the Melbourne, Australia-based studio as one of the premiere developers on Apple’s App Store.
Notably, touch-based plane landing casual title Flight Control on the iPhone had sold 2 million copies as of January 2010, and a DSiWare version recently debuted, in addition to the iPad version’s success.
Much more complex 3D motion/touch-based racing title Real Racing has also seen major success at higher price points than Flight Control, both on the iPhone/iPod Touch and more recently on the iPad.
Gamasutra caught up with Firemint community manager Alexandra Peters to discuss the company’s quick rise to success, its current development and marketing strategies, and the deceptive simplicity of casual game design.
Prior to your iPhone success, you had a history of working heavily with publishers like EA. Is that in the past for you, now that you have a direct channel to your customers?
Alexandra Peters: We haven’t stopped entirely. We’re still doing a bit of publisher work. We’re not going out and looking for it anymore, so this is the first year you see [at developer shows] where we haven’t had anyone meeting with publishers trying to sign up new work. We’re being asked to do more work than we’re really wanting to do.
I would say we’ve gone from 20 percent doing our own stuff to the other way around. We’re doing 80 percent our own and 20 percent on a few publisher projects. We’ve been able to be more selective about the publisher projects that we do, so if something really interesting comes along that we’re keen to work on, that’s a win-win for everybody.
I’ve heard you have a strategy of developing at least one full-scale game and one smaller, cheaper game simultaneously, so you have acccess to different avenues. Is that an ongoing strategy?
AP: I’m not sure I would call it a strategy. It’s more about wanting to make good games. When we have an idea for a game that we think is going to work really well, we’ll make that game.
There’s nothing to say that we wouldn’t do two casual games at the same time or three hardcore high-end 3D games at the same time. This is why we go for great big long stretches of time not really having much to talk about in terms of what’s coming up.
Having said that, we’ve seen the advantages of what that strategy will do for you. You don’t get pigeonholed for one thing. People know that, yes, we did Flight Control, but we also did Real Racing. Similarly, you’re talking about different audiences and different ways of marketing these games, so it’s always good to have a mix, so you can be quite diversified.
It’s always better to have a few irons in the fire rather than all your eggs in one basket.
As long as you don’t get your eggs in the fire.
AP: Scrambled eggs!
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Tags: firemint, flight control, interview, real racing
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