Introversion

• Name: Mark Morris, Director
• Time operating: Since 2002.
• Location: UK.
• Staff: 8.
• Discography: Uplink (PC/Linux/Mac), Darwinia (PC/Linux/Mac), Defcon (PC/Linux/Mac), Multiwinia (PC/Mac), Darwinia+ (XBLA-out soon), Subversion (PC-in progress)

Introversion Links

• Web: www.introversion.co.uk
• Blog: www.introversion.co.uk/blog/index.php

Mark Morris

» About the history of Introversion...

At the end of Uni Chris had this game (Uplink) and we thought we could commercialise it on the internet and see how much we could make - (we expected) a bit of pocket money. But we made quite a bit of cash and we thought, wrongly, that we had made it and we were rich and successful. So we carried on with the business.

» What's your personal interest in it? Have you always liked games?

I'm much more interested in the entrepreneurial activity of running a business and seeing if I can turn this into a long-term sustainable enterprise. I've become interested in games as artistic media; I find the whole process of games to be very interesting. But it's taken years from running Introversion, it's not a natural affinity to me. I played a lot of games when I was a teenager but drifted away at Uni.

» That split you had right at the start (dev / business people) is that something you realised right at the start when you had Uplink

It came from an entrepreneur competition so we had to write this plan to win 10,000 pounds. In order to win, we were quite aware of the differences (in ability) we had to bring to the table. I thought Chris had the game, Tom had the commercial talent, and I was the one who walked past the competition entry.

When we launched the business we carried over these roles, and Johnny (who hadn't been with us in the competition) we really wanted to be on board as he knew so much from an engineering standpoint. It wasn't quite as simple as "we need to put this skillset together to run a business.

We've now got 4 directors, 2 developers, dad does shipping, and one other doing sales and marketing. Chris and Johnny (the directors) are acting as full time coders; they do more coding than they should. Tom and I don't do any coding.

» But that's still only half the company doing developing...

Yes, it's always been like that, and I believe that's the key to our success. We haven't just been a group of coders that got together. Right at the start it was just myself, Chris and Tom, and Chris was the only coder, and Tom and I did the business development so that looked even more skewed. And for a lot of time Chris would sometimes jest "what the hell do you guys do?" We've always gone down a self publishing route right from the beginning - also in terms of the deals you do with other companies - if you entirely focused on the game at a coding or even a production level you don't have the capacity to grow at all. All you end up doing is putting all your eggs in one basket and you hope desperately that it sells.

Small indie teams who have just launched a game and it's done nowhere near as well as they thought it was going to do, and they realise it's not sustainable as they don't have enough revenue coming in to sustain them in the future... and that's a result of being far too focused on one project. If I have a couple of programmers come up to me at Uni or when I'm doing a talk and they ask my advice, the first thing I say is go and find a person from the business or management schools and join up with them. You need someone with good negotiation and communication skills, who can draw the business plans, and stay on top of the finances, and who wants to be quite far removed from the day to day activities on a project.

A lot of teams might find that surprising but I think it s crucial to running a business that is sustainable.

» About trademarks...

There have been a couple of iPhone games called Defcon. We own the worldwide trademark for Defcon. It's a game we are very proud of on the PC and we are hoping to exploit on PSN and hopefully XBLA and iPhone. The legal team are quite keen for you to protect these trademarks, and there are interesting discussions that go on within the company. There's a bit of "this is one guy on the other side of the world, why are we being so mean to him?" but equally "this is value that we've got and we might be on the back foot at some point and need to put out an iPhone version in the future", and what we've found is that when we've got in touch with the developer they've just changed the name. I was impressed with how easy that's been, considering the number of trademark infringements there must have been and how apple have handled that.

» Tim Langdell didn't do it that way... I hope you didn't send out letters demanding all their money

The legal stuff when it goes out can be fairly terse and quite threatening, but what we start with is fairly relaxed. I don't want to be seen as the guy who takes sides in this, but I'm seeing some interesting stuff with us. Recently we've had to take out IP insurance because Microsoft require us to have a certain amount of cover (so that if we release a game and Microsoft are sued for any IP infringement they can claim on our insurance) so we pay every year for this, but whenever you are notified of an IP infringement issue or someone attempts to make a claim against the company, the power to deal with that is removed from you, you have to pass it over to the legal team at your insurer.

If we deal with it we are pretty relaxed, but as soon as it goes out into that big corporate world it escalates so quickly into nasty letters from one legal team to another. It was interesting how we had inadvertently placed ourselves in this position so we could get bigger and onto XBLA. It was an interesting ramification of a scale increase that I'd not foreseen.

» Looking at that increase in costs from releasing onto the bigger platforms - how many of these "slight increase costs" are there?

It's not huge, but it's substantial.

» Nobody wants to take the first step saying "I paid 20k for IP insurance" only to find they could have got it for 5k.

People get a bit upset about giving that info - but we are pretty open. Our quote was 4.5k for 2 million pounds worth of cover. But it would be interesting to see how that compares to other companies getting XBLA cover.

» Where are you with Darwinia+?

Microsoft have about 6 milestones to go through, and we are at the last one - the release candidate. You complete it, once it passes your external QA it then goes off to Microsoft for certification. Once they have certified it they give you a launch window, which can be up to 2 months from the cert date. Even now the guys are testing our second release candidate. We will be certified in about three weeks - if not it will come back to us. It might take a few more weeks on that. We were hoping to be certed in September - but it's taken a while to get through.

» I don't think people are fully aware of the effort required to get their own game through the certification programs of one of the major platform holders. Even XBLIG is a bit of a shock and that's a cut down TRC list. You've got a primarily PC background. What's the process been like for you - did you expect it to take this long?

No we massively, massively underestimated this project. From the time we started Introversion we shipped 3 PC games, so we already had a track record of getting things out the door that were scoring well (Uplink, Darwinia, Defcon) so we knew what we were doing and we really thought the port to XBLA would be quick. We knew we'd have to change to DirectX from OpenGl and do some stuff with leaderboards. On the Darwinia+ website I've put all the old plans down so you can go through and look at the plans and see when they changed. I host them as I thought it would be good for other indie devs to see how wrong we got it. The project got extended by massive, massive amounts. Even now, things like the complexity of the Microsoft sign in process, whether you are using a local or a live enabled profile, or whether it's on the memory unit or the controller, whether the controller is active or not... there are huge matrices you can draw of the state that the Xbox can be in at any point. We just didn't understand that, and even now, at the 11th hour on the project we are still having revelations about the philosophy Microsoft have used to architect this system, and how we need to write our systems to fit in with it. It's taken four years to get it out on the platform.

» I've been in charge of getting games through final submission before so you have my sympathy. The TRC and Lotcheck system - when you read through them you feel "this is ridiculous, this is ridiculous" but it is a philosophy of putting the customer and their whole experience first, and I'll begrudgingly admit it makes sense. Trouble is that excited people coding will write in a way that is productive for the game, but makes retrofitting compliancy to the already completed project hard. Will you do anything different for the next project?

I'd love to say yes, we've learned our lessons, but we probably aren't doing it quite as good as we should. Chris is the creative director and he's off prototyping Subversion. Trying to work out what it should be. The start of the games process is trying to isolate where the fun is in the game. Without the fun there really isn't anything else going on downstream. Chris is very heavily focused on that. Johnny should really be providing the check to that to make sure it is architected to make sure it is amenable to XBLA or PSN, but he's got his head down on Darwinia+ so he's not really having that influence.

Chris has been making sure the interface he develops is amenable to a controller - it's a big problem we had moving from keyboard / mouse when moving from Darwinia / Multiwinia. This time you can see he is designing in a way that would make a console port easier from a control point of view. He had the massive ball ache of working out how that port was going to happen. He spent four months solving that problem. He got there eventually, but on the eve of Multiwinia PC launch we took the game down to PC Gamer, and we made a big interface mistake with our keyboard / mouse implementation. Almost on the week before Multiwinia went into production we were doing more interface rewrites.

I'd like to come back to this concept of me not being a developer - sitting above Chris and Johnny. I'm very aware there are bits of Subversion that are architected correctly and some bits that aren't, because Johnny's focus is elsewhere. I can add value by compensating for that.

» There is a compromise to be had between reengineering your products to make easier money in the future, versus getting the progress now so you have a product for the pc consumer. People don't want to make these compromises and I think some aren't even aware they are there to be made. A lot of the indie developers are just eager and talented, so they pile in without the business concerns.

People make mistakes all the time. What you need is to identify those failures and correct them very quickly. And that's about sustainability and how robust you are. One thing we got wrong was not talking to anyone about the XBLA port. Quite often you have to learn lessons the hard way, to be able to put something in place that works for you. If someone had told us how hard the ride would be, we wouldn't have gone down it, and we wouldn't be having a game out on XBLA and a nice future ahead. We probably would have carried on with a pc game, and who knows; if that doesn't make enough cash and you have enough capability you can exploit it on XBLA, to have a second crack of the whip. But if you've never gone down that route then you shut off that avenue of growth of your business.

» Your blogs mention quite a few things: working with Channel 4, Introversion losing their way...

Chris had a real problem. He doesn't like working with other people. He likes to work off his own back, his own timescales etc. He didn't like the pressure of having C4 as a customer. At the same time I think we took a huge step forward, as we got paid a reasonable amount of money that meant we didn't run out of money. Introversion has run out of cash a few times before. Chris' job is to be the creative one, and I have to keep him in check. We did a huge amount of work on the prototype for Chronometer, and we weren't entirely happy with that at the end (and C4 saw that). But if we do decide we want to do a similar type of game or use any of the ideas that came up there we've already been down that route once, so next time it will be easier and the game will come out and be stronger for it.

» In a lot of work for hire places you'll do a lot of speculative pitch work for free because contracts can take six months before you see any money. Did C4 pay you up front?

Yes. I'm sure Alice (from C4) won't mind me saying that. She's very keen to get a lot of engagement from the UK indie seen. One of the things C4 were very good at was paying for the work and paying on time. We were in a preproduction / scoping phase; we got some at the start and got the rest at the end. Even though the project wasn't commissioned we got paid and that's a testament to C4 working with lots of small indie production companies in the TV domain, so they are quite sensitive to the cash flow situations of small organisations. Small organisations tend to be more creative and that's what they want to foster.

» A quote from your blogs on Darwinia+

"It was the first time a massive company had effectively told IV what to do and we didn't like that all. It was also months of work and the concept of open ended polish and iterations with a company several orders of magnitude larger than our own didn't hugely appeal."

Going through the submissions process, after you've probably practically rewritten Darwinia and Multiwina anyway to fit in the different control scheme; if you were to go through the same process again, are there business practices you could have put in place to minimise these unknown, open ended...

Yes. We just underestimated it. That was the first part. The problem we made - we just thought "how hard can it be to convert the control scheme over to a controller" - the answer is "fucking hard". The lesson is to not assume the controller port is easy. How hard can it be to implement a menu system on a console - that took six months. The reason that was difficult was Microsoft had a very different idea of what they wanted it to look like than what we submitted. It took them quite a long time to convince us of what they were after. So when we looked at doing work in the future one thing we do is design work up front. This sounds really trivial (like gaming 101) but in business a lot of the answers are simple, you just don't see them. We are submitting as part of our concept work both the menu artwork and control scheme. So if there is a problem Microsoft or Sony can turn around and say "we don't really like this concept" and you can fix those and crack on with it. Really we underestimated every portion through technical to look and fell. The only thing that stayed the same is the game itself. Darwinia hasn't really been touched - it's all of the huge wrapping that goes around it.

All those things we thought would be simple to operate with (the wrapping, menus etc) actually have proven to be very difficult. Strategically, the process change that we need to make is to spend a lot more time de-risking the problems and doing the design work at the pitching stage.

Regarding Microsoft - I want to stand up and support the guys; they really, really helped us - they provided designs for us to work from that we were happy with. They donated a lot of usability labwork so we had this enormous 50 page usability doc that came out of them, that detailed every usability problem with the game and there must have been hundreds of hours testing. They were being really clear on what they wanted and communicating it in a good way. I think there wasn't a single decision that we've taken on Darwinia+ that we didn't 100% believe made the game better, so although it was difficult sometimes as it's been a long project, everything improved the quality of the final project.

» All your games - they don't look the same, but have a style. One thing I notice in games is a trend towards more and more realism but this is incredibly resource hungry. Have you made a deliberate strategic decision to keep the graphics far more stylised, and in my opinion making them simpler to create and implement?

Yes, it's important to get the scope right. I do a great event in Newcastle (like the dragons den) - where Codeworks get 4 of us to criticise the pitches of new game designs that people are thinking of working on. And there have been a few indie studios set up on the back of that. Scope is where they tend to fall down. They want to make Halo, but ok that's going to take a team of 400 people, where will you get the money for that? It doesn't fit. Making sure the scope of the game is amenable to team size and the marketing reach you have is crucial to being successful. In terms of the graphics - we don't have any artist but in terms of keeping our costs down it's a decision to go for this programmer art. There's a lot of Chris in it - he's quite a talented artist in his domain; he's got a very good eye for a look and feel that appeals to us so we tend to just move down that particular route that he's taking us. We spend a lot of time on procedural generation. There's no point in us trying to compete with AAA games in look and feel so we don't deliberately bother.

» My take is there's any number of WW2 FPSs and I can't tell the difference, but if someone looks at a picture of Darwinia they recognise it; so that has value. Personally I'm always looking for that sweet spot - between a unique good look and being cheap to produce.

You've returned recently from PAX. How was it?

We came back a few weeks ago from PAX, and I've never been before. I've tended to head over to GDC a bit more, and at PAX the atmosphere was incredible. At GDC it's always tended to be a little bit of whinging developers and undercurrents of discontent in different fields; not in a negative way as they are always good fun, but there does tend to be an "us and them" dev / publisher vibe. But at PAX there was just pure unadulterated energy from gamers and fans. It was just amazing. When they opened the door people sprinted to play halo and Left 4 Dead 2 and Forza. It was just wonderful to see the sharp end of what we do and how much fun there is in this industry. The PAX guys gave us a booth and Microsoft gave us a booth and we had Darwinia+ on display and I remember going to one of the booths and this guy had come back with a friend, and he'd never seen Darwinia before and was absolutely blown away by it. It was so good to see that passion and fire from someone; the last time we'd seen it was four years ago when we launched Darwinia and to see it again in this one guy... I hope there are lots more out there with their 360s who are going to get it.

» There are quite a lot of conferences and shows that indies can display at. But these have a cost; is it possible to quantify the benefit to your product and sales.

It's very hard. Sometimes it's quantifiable because you go and meet people. We met Valve at one GDC and did a deal. But you never actually know who you are going to meet or what opportunities will present themselves. If I was talking to someone new who was price sensitive who wanted to know which one to go to; I would say go to GDC SF. In terms of getting all the major players you might want to see together in one place, that's SF. You'll be able to meet all the other developers / publishers / outsources / indies. You know you're not going to get bored.

» If I'm a new developer and coming to the end of my product - it's getting ready for launch in a few months; there's so many avenues to spend time and money- going to trade shows; adverts; getting in with print mags; there's a lot of costs. What do you think is the most cost-effective thing you've done to help sales?

I don't really believe in print advertising. We haven't really done any online advertising. A few years ago we just worked with the UK mags and a few of the major websites. We were really lucky - when we started "3 guys from Uni making games" was incredibly new and we got a huge amount of press attention and love for going down this path. For Multiwinia this had gone, and it went because there were many other small indie games studios that had started up, and so we weren't in any way novel or new, and we learned the hard way that we are only as good as the game we are launching. We launched at exactly the same time as World of Goo and of course WOG did phenomenally well, an incredible game, and kudos to 2dBoy, but we were shocked. We were expecting to get a WOG-sized response to Multiwinia because that's what we'd always had in the past.

I think marketing for the indie has now got more sophisticated than it used to be as you can't just rest on your heels and send out a few press releases. If there is an indie studio and you are launching a game and don't have someone entirely responsible for PR then I think they are missing a massive trick. They need to be working on all these areas: talking to magazines, talking to websites, checking Google analytics, make sure the company is selling from own site, make sure that Steam is in place; managing campaigns... what do you need to give to Valve to make them happy to give them added value. It's a full time job to come up with the ideas and assets and measures of effectiveness to launch a game. I think that's a whole interview in itself, and a full time job.

» You set up an ecommerce site (Glengarry). What have you learned from it?

When we started we were just processing credit cards way back then. Our web presence hasn't really evolved and it's not a particularly good sales site. It's very good for informing the customers about games so if you want to find out about Uplink come to our site. (It's not good) in terms of tracking footfall around the site, and that you get redirected to our sales site which doesn't look the same so there are potential trust issues. We identified we aren't doing our ecommerce well. I was hoping that Darwinia+ would launch this year so our website can be reworked so we can be much more effective at selling the game. Then we'll take some of these principles and putting them into practice with a whole new website.

» Is Google analytics sophisticated enough to give you the info you want?

There are too many of our sites. Uplink has 70 odd pages added over time. Google analytics is great but we aren't set up for it. Our domains are different so it finds it hard to track people across these entry points to the store. One of the key specs of the new sites is that it works well with Google analytics so we can run marketing diagnostics.

» You said on one of your blog posts you were putting a break on growth. This was about 6 months ago. Are you just trying to get stable to continue to make games with roughly the size you currently are, or is it an absolute goal to grow to get 2, 3, 5 teams.

Personally I want us to get bigger. I want to be bigger and put more games out the door every year. I don't want us to lose our ability to be fiercely creative, and they must have high "production standards". For me this is why I sit in this chair, to make this company bigger and to be able to replicate what we've done in the past on an ever increasing scale.

What I think will happen ultimately is if were successful is we'll get too big, and we'll be sat in a board meeting one day, all driving up in our Ferraris, and Cliff will say "I want it to go back to the old days when I could actually write games, when I could spend my time making games and not being in production meetings", and we'll probably resize the company. At the moment I want us to be able to put out at least one game per year from Introversion and that includes ports. Defcon PSN would count. That's the first step, but I want to be able to put out new IP once a year.

» Is there a big plan to carry on with these remakes and new platforms? What happened with Defcon DS?

No one was interested in publishing it. We might do a DSi version but it depends on how much cash we get from Darwinia+ and whether we think there is a market there. We've learned a lot from our experience with XBLA and we think Defcon is a really successful game on pc, and getting it out on PSN and XBLA are nice projects from us given what we've spent 4 years learning. They are quick to get out and hopefully lucrative so if Darwinia+ does well we will be looking at that, however that's not a sustainable as there are only Darwinia+ and Defcon we can take across, and that's why subversion is so important.

» Sequels don't have to be double the effort to release a new game in a shorter time. Are you quite prepared to take creative cuts just so you can get a better rounded portfolio out?

That's a very interesting question. If we need to do that (take creative cuts) then we've not grown in the right way. I.e. we haven't put the process in place to manage the games. Above everything else it should be about the game, not the portfolio, being worked on. If that means it takes a bit longer, like we don't get it out in a year, but in 18 months then fine, we'll roll with that. A company I've got enormous admiration for is Pixar, because Pixar have made... I can't even remember how many films they've made..., but each one has been a stunningly high quality work of art. Apart from Toy Story 2 and 3 they tend to avoid going down the route of milking IP and sequel after sequel. I want us to grow in the same manner that Pixar grew. With Subversion we have lots of cool ideas for Subversion 2 and Subversion 3 if you like, but they are more like features we want to put in now, but we won't be able to finish for when we need to launch it. It's kind of like we can come up with this massive project but we might be able to divide into three different tranches of release. I don't mean this in an episodic way, but its more if we believe we can do something very cool within the subversion environment after we've released it then we won't have a problem doing it.

» I'm torn myself. I've read a lot about maintaining your IP; it's the IP that is valuable. I do wonder though; for new companies dealing with publishers they have nothing to barter so you end up giving away your IP anyway. For myself I feel I need to be business focused and I should be set up to make sequels not because the IP has value, but because it's a cheaper route to trying to make money.

It does depend on what you want to do. Introversion is kind of an experiment in some ways of whether we can make the kind of games we are interested in making. Some companies set up saying we are going to make 4 Xbox games a year and make an engine that takes away all the problems we came across because all the games fit into their framework. Now we want to go down that route but those that deliberately set up and sort of churn the handle by releasing 4 or 5 smaller XBox games - they've probably got a slightly better business model because they minimise tech risks by reuse; if one game doesn't hit the niche the next one might, so there are lots of reasons for doing it that way.

But fundamentally what it comes down to is as a group of people - is that what you are going to be happy spending your life doing? As entrepreneurs that run business we need to be happy with our day to day activity.

And so for Introversion and for Chris in particular sequels and ports are not his thing. So if Introversion denies his ability to make new games that will be it; he will be out the door. Similarly for me if Introversion doesn't offer ever increasing teams and salaries then I'm off. So there's a balance between the two of us that keeps us on the right path. It's not always easy but I think we are stronger for it

» How much should finances occupy the company?

It's the lifeblood of the organisation. If you do not have complete understanding of your complete financial situation you will suffer. However, decisions don't always need to be governed by the bottom line. It's a very difficult questions to answer. If you ignore them you are a dead man, but if you are entirely ruled by them then you are a banker.

To put a slightly different spin on this; games are creative people based businesses. And neither creativity nor talent that comes from people reduces well to a balance sheet. So if that's all you're managing, purely by looking at the numbers, then your games company will suffer. The flip side; if you're not keeping an eye on your numbers and your predictions are unrealistic and your not throwing out a cash flow for the next 2 or 3 years then you will also fail. So I think finances are important but they aren't everything

» I want people to have the best chance of making their game and having the finances to make the next one. I've heard of several high profile projects that came out on something like XBLIG and iPhone after taking a year and a half and having no sales. A new unknown team, a long project, no marketing; there's too much risk taken on there.

I had a wonderful quote from a guy, "if your iPhone game takes more than a month to develop you are wasting your time; you're taking too much risk", because iPhone in particular is just crap for making any money, imo. It's just rubbish. There are just two successes and millions of failures. There are so many people quitting their jobs and becoming iPhone developers it is ridiculous. If you take someone you should ask them a few simple questions:

• "Whats your burn rate?"
• "How much do you expect to sell on iPhone?"

So if they expect to sell more than 20,000 units then they are probably in the top 5% percentile of games / apps from the iPhone store. So I think that's when you've got to be realistic about your finance and numbers. It's the same with XBLA. We are predicting the minimum number we need to continue the business is 28,000 and we think that's eminently doable, bearing in mind Space Giraffe has been quoted as doing about 26,000 and that was the worst ever selling game, so we are quite comfortable we can survive off the back of this. But you're right, if someone came to me and said I'm setting up a team of five people to make iPhone games I wouldn't back them.

» What is your competitive advantage?

I think our refusal to have our creativity shackled in any way. As soon as you even begin to put Chris anywhere near something where he doesn't think he has freedom, he starts to kind of whinge publicly. Just the fact that Chris does seem to be able to make games that people really love and that sell, this seems to keep Introversion going. And the mix of the team (is important).

» If you could travel back in time... what advice would you give yourself?

When we took the XBLA deal we should have talked to a lot of other XBox devs and get a more realistic plan definitely.

» If its 4 years on Darwinia+ it's quite hard to work on. But with PAX I hope that motivates you again; that you can enjoy your child a second time.

It's been a long ride but it's still a great game. When they test and play MP they are still laughing and enjoying. We started in 2002 so it's been 7 years of working on little green stick men, but the fact these guys still play and laugh and enjoy Darwinia is really heartening. If we can love it then the Xbox audience will too.

» What have you done you wouldn't change? What would you hold up to others as an achievement?

The diversity of titles that we've gone for. We want every game to be different and unique and stand on its own as a wonderful example of creative brilliance. That's very grandiose but kind of summarises where we want to be, and that's what we've done well in the past and where we will continue to be.

Next...

As of 16 Nov 2009 Introversion are next to release Darwinia+ on XBLA. Keep track here.