New Game Heli-Rescue for iPhone

Distinctive are very pleased to announce their latest iPhone game ‘Heli Rescue’. The game sees you playing the part of a search and rescue controller. Using the ‘line drawing’ control system, as popularised by Flight Control and Harbour Master, you control the movement of up to 4 helicopters in order to rescue as many people as you can.

Level 1

Draw a path from the helicopter to the person you want to rescue and then draw a path back to the helipad to drop them off at the hospital for treatment.

Three types of helicopter can carry between one and four passengers but, watch out, the bigger helicopters use much more fuel.

The game will launch with 3 levels but with more coming in future updates.

A very attractive initial price of $0.99 has been set for the game when it is launched in mid August 2009.

Title screen

Rugby Union arrives on iPhone

Sheffield UK, June 1st 2009. Distinctive Developments Ltd have been busy working up a sweat to bring you Rugby Nations 09 – the first Rugby game for iPhone and iPod Touch. The popularity of Rugby continues to grow with the 2007 Rugby World Cup attracting a record 2.25 million attendees and combined TV viewing figures of 4.2 billion. 

Sadly, Rugby is often under-represented on games systems but with Distinctive’s extensive experience of producing some of the best selling sports games for mobile phones they have created an entertaining game on the World’s greatest mobile device.

Rugby Nations is a fun arcade Rugby Union game that’s easy to play, has innovative controls and has great visuals. Using a mixture of touch-screen and tilt controls you pass, sprint, tackle and kick your way up the pitch – precious inch by precious inch – until you dive over the try line to score. Conversion kicks are controlled by a swipe of the screen to set the power and direction of the kick. 

With three of the World’s greatest tournaments to play through and ten of the World’s best teams the game is sure to keep you entertained for many hours. 

Distinctive have partnered with Will Carling and RuckU.com, the social networking site for Rugby fans, to help promote the game. Will Carling commented ‘I’m passionate about Rugby and so are millions of other fans around the World so it’s great to be able to help bring this iPhone game to those fans.’

Nigel Little, Distinctive’s Managing Director, said ‘Rugby is an exciting sport that deserves to have it’s place on the Apple App Store. We hope that rugby fans around the world enjoy the game.’

The game is set for release at the start of June to coincide with the British and Irish Lions tour of South Africa at a great price of €3.99 (£2.99)

Rugby Nations 09 first looks

Today, 5th May 2009, we are excited to give you a first look at our Rugby Nations 09 game for iPhone/iPod Touch. Rugby Nations 09 is a full 15 on 15 Rugby Union game featuring 10 national teams from around the World. Release date for the game has been set to be around the start of the British Lions tour of South Africa at the end of May.

Headline features include:

• Full 15 players per team
• 10 nations teams.
• Excellent 3D graphics.
• Three different cup competitions.
• Unique control system using a mixture of accelerometer and touchscreen controls.
• Swipe controls to score conversions.

Rugby Nations 09 Screenshot

More screenshots can be found here

Are $.99 iPhone Apps a viable business?

Like the majority of iPhone developers we have been very interested in the sales figures being released by people such as Joel Comm (iFart) and Firemint (Flight Control). Thanks to these very kind releases of information developers of all sizes can see the potential of a massive selling game. Having studied these figures we have tried to gain some perspective and understand whether $.99 apps are a viable long term business. Since the data that this research was based on was put into the public domain then it only seemed fair that we share the results with the iPhone developer community.

We started with the great data that the developer of iFart made public in December 2008. This linked chart position to sales figures, producing the chart below.

Extended Sales Figures

This shows all the signs of a hit driven ‘Long Tail’ business as discussed in Chris Anderson’s book ‘The Long Tail’.

To be useful for our research we needed to extend this curve further into the lower chart positions. We therefore came up with a formula that matched the iFart data and allowed us plug in any chart position and get out a number of sales.

OK, it’s time for a massive disclaimer. Whilst these figures are based on actual data we are in no way claiming that if you achieve a particular chart position will you necessarily see the same sales figures.

iFart seems to have been a phenomenon mainly in the USA and we wanted to look at the best case scenario of a worldwide smash hit. So, when Firemint released their sales figure we could adjust the figures upwards and produce a new graph.

Extended Sales Figures

Now that we had this great formula we could model how chart position affects sales. We created four categories of game sales performance.

• Excellent represents a game that reaches number one for 6 weeks and sells in the region of 750,000 over it’s lifetime.
• Good represents a game that reaches a highest position of 15 in the charts and sells in the region of 220,000 over it’s lifetime.
• Average represents a game that reaches a highest position of 70 in the charts and sells in the region of 70,000 over it’s lifetime.
• Poor represents a game that reaches a highest position of 1000 in the charts and sells in the region 3,500 over it’s lifetime.

If we assume that development and marketing spend on a game is $50,000 then the break even point across 10 games would be 1 Good, 4 Average and 5 Poor sellers. Move that one good seller to an Excellent seller and you’ve made a 54% return on investments. However, just change that one Good seller for an Average one and you’ve lost 33% of your investment.

However, it’s interesting to note that if you spend twice as much on development and marketing but charge $2.99 for the game then 1 Good, 4 Average and 5 Poor would generate an ROI of 30% and even 5 Average and 5 Poor would break-even.

Whether you see $.99 games as an opportunity or a huge risk probably depends on your outlook on life. However, it seems to us that the statement that these low price games are unsustainable is probably true.

Hopefully, this post will encourage some healthy debate about the subject if nothing else.

Bunnies Escape to Android

Sheffield, UK March 26^th 2009. Distinctive Developments Ltd are overjoyed to announce that their quirky puzzle game ‘Flip Zoo’ has just been launched on the Android Market. Warren the rabbit and the rest of the crew of PETZ (Planet Earth’s Traveling Zoo) engaged warp drive to arrive on this new world where they hope to make lots of new friends.

Flip Zoo is a unique puzzle game where you save a variety of animals by the power of turning platforms on/off with a single touch of the screen. Guide the animals to the exits to save them from dying in a number of terrible ways. The game features 66 fiendishly designed levels, one-touch control system, tutorials, a level editor to create you own levels and the funkiest music this side of the crab nebula.

As a long time mobile games developer Distinctive are committed to supporting multiple mobile platforms. They launched the iPhone version of the game on 28^th January where it has received 5 star customer ratings.

The game is on sale on both iPhone and Android at a great price of £1.20

Nigel Little, managing director of Distinctive, said ‘The team and I are excited to bring this great puzzle game to a new audience on Android. I’m sure the game will give people many hours of brain teasing fun.’

Warren the rabbit, one of the characters from the game, has his blog here

For more details contact:

Distinctive Developments Ltd

Email: info@distdevs.co.uk

Web: http://www.distdevs.co.uk

Twitter: http://twitter.com/distinctivegame

Tel: +44 114 281 2208