Introversion's Mark Morris

I found that interesting - people who are looking at that from the outside world would have thought that Introversion was doing okay. But if they'd correlated that with the leaderboard score, they'd see it's not a lot to be seventh on the platform.

But the Valve sale - it was just phenomenal. A couple of statistics that I'm sure Valve won't mind me sharing: We've now sold more than $2.5 million through Steam, which is pretty good for Introversion, through life. Not all of that comes back to us, because sometimes it's been in bundle packs, and we've gotten less. But basically it equates to almost bang on £1 million, so we're really pleased.

The sale did in the ball park of $250,000 - so when you're back to being a team of four people, that's a lot of revenue.

Yes, it is - for the first time in a long time we've got a cash flow that extends out for two years at our size, which is nice. We've got two projects on the go at the moment - Subversion, which we're talking a lot about at the moment. It's new IP, very interesting stuff, but still not fully worked out in terms of which way the game will go... even on a daily basis Chris decides more about what the game is going to look like, but we're still not quite at the point where we can put together a production plan and say "It's coming out in two years".

We've also been working with Sony on Defcon PSN - given our Darwinia+ experience we're a little bit less to just jump in bed with Sony if we can't find someone to share the development risk there. My original thinking was that the consoles open up and pour more sales into your existing market - but that just wasn't true with Darwinia+, it was such a tiny movement in scheme of things.

I know that Sony is a different platform, Defcon is a different game and the price points are different - so I am confident. But at the same time...

And the original Darwinia was such a different product for its time, back in 2004-5 - it could be the case that it's just too old. We got a lot of love I think because we were the only indie studio that was putting out big triple-I titles - that's why we wont he awards and got so much attention.

But if you look at where we are now, with things like World of Goo, Braid, Trials, Joe Danger - they're similar-sized games to Darwinia, but they have higher production values and are more accessible.

We set up Introversion primarily to work on new games, and I wanted to take the studio in a direction where we were able to put these games out on different platforms - but our first attempt at that hasn't really worked. So going forward I think it's more important for us to make Subversion and put a new game out there for people to play - another 80-90-plus Metacritic game, so people can see we haven't lost our touch.

That's more important to me than expanding is now, and working with Sony - but at the same time, if we can find funding for it, because I think Defcon PSN is a good bet, then I want to do it. I'd quite like to see Subversion on PS3, or maybe XBLA, who knows? Once it's a little more concrete, maybe it's an avenue we can go down.

I don't agree with that. For Darwinia+ we didn't have anything new - it was just Darwinia on Xbox - and we were covered by every major XBLA site. They all played it, and all reviewed it strongly, and I was quite surprised, because internally there was a bit of concern that journalists weren't going to be that interested.

But actually there's a kind of professionalism - they're Xbox journalists so they're going to review a new Xbox game. If you've got a lower barrier to entry with a platform like Steam, you're going to find it harder.

So we did what we always do - and we are good at it, but it's fairly simple to me. We put together a physical book about Darwinia+ with all the information, and we physically mailed that out to all the journalists - which is what we've always done, because even in the digital world physical things have more presence.

We organised a press tour in the US, which we'd never done before, and going from no XBLA knowledge to a successful tour... we spent about four days over there - it was quite an experience, but not as hard as I thought it would be.

At one point we were going to use a PR company to organise it for us, but we didn't really have the money. I wouldn't recommend it now - if you've got the time and you're our kind of size, do it yourself. It is a bit more hassle, carrying dev kits around and so on - you've got to know where you're going next - but we did it. We were quoted $30,000 for a PR company to basically pick us up from the airport and ferry around... and you don't need to spend that.