Introversion's Mark Morris

We probably spent less than £10,000 in total marketing Darwinia+. We had a launch party at BAFTA too, which was quite fun.

It's not that expensive. We didn't pay an awful lot for BAFTA, because they're trying to get into the games scene. Channel 4 are good people at the moment - I'm sure if somebody wanted to launch a game at Channel 4 they'd love to have you. So you can do all this stuff.

Maybe it's because of our status, I don't know. Maybe they take a call from Introversion because it's a call from Introversion, and it might be harder for other people - I don't know.

Maybe - but if you make the approach well, so they have the information they need, a demo, copies of the game, and you think about the package they're sending through... I think most journalists are journalists because they're interested in playing games - so they're going to put your disc in, or whatever, and that's your foot in the door.

It's possible - I think PR companies have their place, but I do tend to think that sometimes there's just a template that they'll use for sending out a game press release, and that's a tried-and-tested, metricated method that's 'guaranteed' to work.

But what it means then is that every journalist receives the same press release from the same people... whereas if yours is slightly different, you're going to get a bit more attention.

I'd go so far as to say that if you're not on Steam, then you're not an indie game developer of any note. You absolutely have to be on that platform at the moment. Steam doesn't ask for exclusivity, and I know it's hard to get on there - Valve doesn't make it easy - but that's part of the challenge. If you want to run a company you have to find a way of getting your game on there.

Part of the reason for that is that Valve regularly runs promotions that mean you can really capitalise on your back-catalogue, and you don't have that control with the consoles. Thinks like the iPad and iPhone, I think they're too crowded, and awareness is too difficult.

And the other thing I'd say is that we've been doing a lot of work on the Introversion website recently, metricating it and putting all the analytics in place - we sell via our own site. I've always said this from the start, and still do - you have to be selling from your own website as well, because you see 99 per cent of every transaction that goes through there, so every piece of marketing that you do links back to your website.

A regular Steam month is about a fifty-fifty revenue split between Valve and our website, because although the volume isn't anywhere near what they're doing, the money coming through is enough to even it out.