Talking about the future of the company led me to ask about their relationship with publishers, which can be quite contentious. "Mark [Morris]'s rather controversial remarks at the IGF awards turned a few heads ... [but] at the end of the day, we have quite set views on what the role of a developer and a publisher should be. The relationship should ideally be one of collaboration, but what often happens today is that the publisher tries to run the whole show, which can be a disaster when they start trying to dabble in the creative sides of things. We don't have a problem working with publishers to sell a game, but they won't be involved in the creative process, and for that reason alone, we like to own our own IPs. One of the problems for indies is that the publishers aren't really interested - that's the bottom line - and it can be a real struggle to get yourselves noticed and taken seriously. When Darwinia released, we were big enough to self-publish in the U.K., but the U.S. market is around 10 times larger, and we just didn't have the staff. It takes a success story like the Darwinia launch on Steam, or winning awards at the Independent Games Festival, for publishers to sit up and take notice of us."
That freedom can make it challenging to run a company, but it also allows them to make them the games they want to make. "Subversion is my dream game," Chris said, when I asked what he'd make if he could make anything. "At Introversion, we aren't bound by the same resource concerns [as big game companies], because of the way we handle gameplay and content - and each game we've made has been our dream game at the time of it's making." Don't expect Introversion to change, either, because the freedom they have, he says, was "why we started the company!"
[em]Shannon Drake is a Contributing Editor for The Escapist and changed his name when he became a citizen. It used to be Merkw
