Pocketgamer.biz have a great interview with Firemint CEO, Robert Murray, on their ambitious iPhone game, Real Racing. You'll find a lot of information on the AI, the engine, and numerous other technical accomplishments that Real Racing made, but what is remarkable is that this game was even made at all. Rob admits that a lot of money was spent creating Real Racing, as well as the infrastructure for the social connectivity capabilities, and that it made no business sense at all to do so. From Pocketgamer.biz...
(Rob) It was very ambitious and there were plenty of times when I wished I hadn't started the game. It wasn't just that we were developing this incredibly rich game, developing Cloudcell [Firemint's online platform] at the same time made everything even bigger and more complex.
It's a very hard decision to spend so much money on one game, so you really have to find something to believe in and believe in strongly...
At the end of the day though, I am incredibly proud of what our team has achieved, and I think I got value for money. I will say one thing however... I am very grateful for the success of Flight Control, which gave us some breathing space to really finish this properly.
Firemint has found the level of resistance of gamers to purchase $10 games from the appstore rather challenging, however does not feel it is necessary to drop the price down any time soon.