The Flight Deck
Firemint's Alexandra Peters on how the Melbourne company is building its original IP iPhone business
One of the standout hits of last year for the iPhone was Flight Control - a simple, ultra-casual yet fiendishly addictive game from Melbourne, Australia-based Firemint. The company has since follows that up with an exceptionally smooth, detailed 3D title called Real Racing, which has again caught the imagination of gamers and critics alike.
Here, Alexandra Peters, the company's community manager, explains Firemint's outlook on the games business - where the company came from, what it believes is important and where the future of iPhone development lies.
Well, we started about 10 years ago, in 1999, and for the first two or three years it was essentially just one person - Robert Murray, who's our founder and CEO, and still owns 100 per cent of the company - doing programming contracts, mostly for other game developers, but with a few other things mixed in.
And then in 2002 we started making mobile phone games, and that's been our biggest claim to fame. We've done a few games on other platforms - mainly on Nintendo GBA and DS - but we were best-known for mobile games, and also for work-for-hire services.
We worked our way up through the ecosystem after doing contracts for other developers, then we started doing some lower-end publisher work, and we worked our way up to the premium publisher work.
In 2007-8 we were doing triple-A mobile games for people like EA - their Madden NFL 3D games for three years. That was great experience, when you can work on titles like that and see the response from the audience - it was very rewarding.
The other thing that happened as we were working our way up is that our name was becoming... well, if not prominent, then we went from not being mentioned at all to at least having our name in the credits. From the perspective of having pride in your work, that was really wonderful to see happening.
We're in Melbourne, Australia - it's one of the two big game development hubs in the country - and it's got a really thriving indie scene in particular at the moment.
I guess we were doing these kinds of games a long time before it was really sexy to make them, so it's interesting for us to see how, even a few years ago if you said you made mobile games people would switch off - but now they're a lot more impressed.
From our point of view, some things have changed drastically, but others haven't changed that much. We're still really focused on just making really awesome, fun games - and pushing the hardware to its limits, which is one of our hallmarks.
On the other hand we've got this incredible change in our business model where, what we're doing now with our self-publishing, we never would have been able to do before the App Store came along.
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.
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. But that said, we're also a little bit platform-agnostic, because for us it's about being able to make really fun, really polished games that are targeted for the platform it's built or adapted for - and having the direct channel to consumers.
Yes, I think there's definitely something in that. What's interesting for us is that we've got two games at opposite ends of the spectrum - we've got Flight Control, which is ultra-casual, which didn't have a high budget and didn't take us long to develop. And then on the other hand we've got Real Racing which has phenomenal production values and 3D graphics. That was over a year in development, with a budget of over $1 million US dollars - funded by ourselves.
So original IP for us - that's exactly what we want to do. We don't want to make a Match-3 puzzle game - everything in our studio and everything we do is driven by the game idea and server the game. Our PR, for example, is driven by development, not the other way around.
It's brilliant for us to be able to sit down and explore all the areas that we have, but have a channel like the iPhone that we know we can get our game out on - there won't be major barriers to submission or publication. As long as you follow a few simple rules it's pretty straightforward really.
Then 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.