Inside Business have made available for viewing their televised feature on Firemint with CEO, Rob Murray, on the ABC website. It's a great piece on Firemint's success on the Appstore market, and Rob does a great job explaining some of adjustments that the Melbourne studio has made moving from work-for-hire publisher work to self publishing their own games.
As many independent studios are very well aware, self publishing requires a whole lot of effort in other areas that games developers aren't traditionally involved with, but it's something Firemint have realised the importance of. From the feature...
ROB MURRAY: We need more marketing, more support and community interaction, more forecasting and business intelligence.
So, we're kind of expanding that department within our company.
One of the current big issues facing the local games industry as well as any company that depends on exports is the Aussie dollar reaching parity with the U.S, and Firemint is explains the measures they will have to take to weather through this challenging period...
ROB MURRAY: We can talk about a 10 per cent rise in the Australian dollar that just cuts straight into our revenue and you can imagine what it does to company profits.
Ultimately, there's not much we can do to combat a strong Australian dollar. All our costs are labour costs.
It's very labour intensive. All we can do is slow down our growth, hold back on what we're doing, and fortunately we will have the margins to get through a dollar that might go to parity.
It's an excellent feature on Firemint that's well worth watching. It's also great to see what the studio looks like as well as see some of the dev folks who make the magic happen. View it at the ABC website.