Introversion's Mark Morris
The indie studio boss on the importance of Steam, and why the company nearly failed
In the past few years one name in particular has been synonymous with the UK's indie scene - Introversion - with a string of original titles, including Defcon and Darwinia.
At this year's Develop conference we caught up with MD Mark Morris to find out how things had been going in the past year, only to discover that the answer was somewhat unexpected.
It's been quite a difficult year, actually. We launched Darwinia+ in February and we had really high hopes for that, while we were - in crude terms - right at the end of our money, we were really running out.
We found out two days before Christmas Eve that we'd passed certification, so that was nice - it was a happy Christmas, as it could have gone the other way - then we had a break. After that we went into the crazy marketing push for the launch.
Now, we haven't been particularly vocal about this, but Darwinia+ didn't sell enough - we just couldn't carry on trading in the same form that we were in before. I think it probably took us about three or four weeks to accept that, because you just don't want to. And it looked at one point as if we were going to be close to achieving what we wanted to.
So the first thing we had to go was get rid of the staff, which was a sad thing. I'd never done that before in my career - it was hard, because they'd all been working hard on the product. We didn't put in too much crunch, but after working so hard to basically say "Thanks for all your hard efforts, by the way now you're out..."
It's part of working in the games industry, but it's never nice - and we shut down the office as well, and kind of crawled back into the core Introversion team of just myself, Chris, Tom and Johnny... the original four directors, back in our bedrooms again.
Once the dust has settled, that was actually quite a good place to find ourselves, because the burn rate had gone through the floor and working and managing are two very different jobs - while we're quite good as a management team, implementation is what we're best at - we started working very efficiently again.
We were looking at trying to create Steam achievements for Defcon - because we wanted to get Valve to run a Defcon promotion, as a good way of generation some revenue, but also because we were a little bit done with Darwinia and we were looking for a new push.
At the same time we were also hoping we could do something with Microsoft to see if maybe the poor sales for Darwinia+ were down to the price point - because it was expensive, 1200 points, for quite a strange game. We thought if we could get down to maybe 400 or 800, we might pick up more people.
So we integrated the achievements, took it to Steam and asked if we could use it as a promotion - and they did the Valve thing of not responding.
The way you work with Valve is that you fire things at them, and when you get a response you know they've bitten. They don't tend to discuss with you... They do say yes if it works for them, but actually everything we do with Valve seems to work out quite well - so we're happy.
Anyway, we ended up about six weeks ago with Darwinia+ as Deal of the Week, in with five other games at 800 points. The needle moved, but not much. It was interesting as well, because we were around sixth or seventh in their download chart, so comparing the numbers we were seeing at our end... it was interesting, it makes me think that maybe there's a very sharp drop from between the top two and the rest.