Days of betting small and winning big on iPhone are gone - Firemint

Firemint's Alexandra Peters has said that the days of betting small and expecting to win big on iPhone games are gone, and expressed her view that commercial successes now require significant investment.

"I think the days where you can do something quite simple, and do it on a small budget, are probably gone," Peters told GamesIndustry.biz in an interview published today.

"These days with the amount of apps that are out there, and the increasing number of games coming out every day - and some of the really high-end developers who are now getting into it - I think if you're going to make an iPhone game and you want it to be commercially successful, you have to invest in it.

"That's certainly something that we're doing - we're spending a lot of time getting our next titles right. I wouldn't encourage people to bet small and expect to win big."

Firemint is now best known for two iPhone titles - Flight Control, which Peters describes as "ultra casual" with a modest budget, and Real Racing, which was developed on a budget of over $1 million.

Prior to the introduction of the iPhone and developing those two titles, Firemint worked mostly making mobile games for other companies, said Peters. However she said it was the App Store, not the iPhone, that revolutionised business for the studio and for small developers overall.

"People talk about the iPhone as being really revolutionary, but the massive change has really come about because of the App Store - and the fact that Apple was able to push that through has been a massive achievement when you consider how fragmented the mobile phone ecosystem was before that," she explained.

"We're really proud to say we're an iPhone developer, and it's a brilliant platform to develop for - it's really enabled this change in our business where we've been able to do less work-for-hire and more of our own games.

"You have this distribution platform that takes the game all over the world, handles all of the financial side for you, and essentially you just get some money in your account at the end of the day. It's unprecedented.

"As a studio, changing from work-for-hire to self-publishing and taking on a lot of those publisher functions - if we'd had to do all of the distribution and financial aspects as well, it might have been an insurmountable obstacle. It's empowered us to do original IP."

Peters said that Flight Control had sold in quantities of over 2 million to date - "some developers announce numbers and say "downloads" and that's a mix of free and paid - but this one's had 2 million sales" - while a free version of Real Racing has been downloaded over 5 million times and led to an increase in sales of the full game.

You can read the full interview with Peters in which she also discusses original IPs, the issue of visibility in the App Store and the effect of word-of-mouth marketing for iPhone games, here.