![]() ![]() There were now just two possible ways to survive. The company we’d founded together out of university was almost dead, the Directors took it in turns to lose the will to continue for a few days at a time, and it all looked pretty bleak for a while. For the first time since starting Introversion, I Googled for jobs around the Cambridge area, making it as far as actually clicking on some links before having to fight back tears. This was probably the lowest point for me personally. We tightened our belts across the board, bringing all our monthly expenses right down. In the end we closed our office in London Bridge, and moved into somewhere a lot smaller and a lot less cool in Elephant&Castle, south London (where we are still based today). We made some hard choices, and seriously considered closing up for good. We were on track to be bust in just a few months. We knew the money issue had to be addressed directly, and quickly. We started trying whatever we could think of to drive people to the game, prompting some terrible ideas and some strong arguments. In the end, big price drops and promotions on steam brought a decent audience to Multiwinia, but not the cash we needed to make it to game five. But we knew Multiwinia was not a hugely popular game – it wasn’t the reviewers fault, they were just experiencing the same apathy the gamers were. The demo itself did very well, with a very high conversion rate that continues, but getting people to play the demo was really tough. Reviewers in many cases had already moved on to the next months set of games, and gamers weren’t downloading the demo. All of the print magazine reviews were at least a month late – entirely our fault – but that had knock-on effects, with online sites less interested in reviewing it as a result. Multiwinia came out with virtually no momentum, and a palpable lack of interest across the board. ![]() Then we blamed the magazines for not reviewing the game, then we blamed Microsoft, then eventually we came to our senses and started thinking about how to survive. We blamed the marketing, then they blamed the game. After working like crazy all year, it all came crashing down around us. ![]()
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January 2023
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