The Flight Deck

Well, we're really interested in building the Firemint brand - not to the extent that it's intrusive, because the game comes first - but we do want people to know, when they're playing Flight Control and Real Racing that they're Firemint games.

So when we announce our next titles people will think back to the two previous games they've seen, have nigh expectations, and support our games. It's a double-edged sword, in that you have this opportunity to build something special - and we're really about focusing on just a few high-quality titles rather then pumping out lots of average games - so we're staking our fortunes on building our brand.

We've been really lucky with the recognition we've been getting - we're so fortunate with the community support.

We think there's a huge word-of-mouth effect with iPhone games in particular. People play the games and will tell their friends, and that's something that we think about very carefully and how we can support that?

Well, we can say that it's had over 2 million sales - some developers announce numbers and say "downloads" and that's a mix of free and paid - but this one's had 2 million sales. I can also say that Real Racing has also been a great success for us, both commercially and critically. The feedback we're getting from players is superb - we couldn't be happier with it.

We also put out a free version of Real Racing, called Real Racing GTi, which has a limited amount of content - that's also been a great success, and has had 5 million downloads, and also led to an increase in sales of the full game.

I think the days where you can do something quite simple, and do it on a small budget, are probably gone. 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. That's what we do anyway, but I wouldn't encourage people to bet small and expect to win big.

I guess that's another thing we're seeing with the App Store - it's constantly evolving. Apple tweaks things - like the introduction of the top-grossing apps - so you can see they're thinking about it and improving things as they go.