Mark-Morris
Latest
UK's Channel 4 kills digital innovation fund [Update: Lots of gaming still 'on the slate for 2011' at Channel 4]
The UK's Channel 4 is ceasing 4iP, its £20m digital innovation fund. The division was responsible for digital innovations like AudioBoo and Privates. Any projects currently in development will finish and the remaining 40 percent of the fund will be redistributed. We remembered that Channel 4 was funding Introversion's Chronometer, but studio co-founder Mark Morris tells us it "never got taken forward beyond the concept stage." Morris elaborated, "Sad news about C4 though, they were doing some good in the business." [Update 10/8 3pm ET: Channel 4's Alice Taylor – you may recognize her blog, Wonderland! – took to the comments to clarify how this affects some projects: "Naw. Mixup. 4iP is going, but it wasn't responsible for Privates. 4iP's closure doesn't affect The Curfew, or Privates DLC, or 1066, or Smokescreen, or Cover Girl, or Trafalgar Origins, or 303 Squadron, or Ada, or Bow Street Runner, or the 8 or so new game commissions we've got on the slate for 2011. 4iP's games: Papa Sangre and friends, they'll still turn up too. Hope that helps! It sure does. Thanks, Alice!]
Introversion credits Steam for company's salvation
In a candid post on Introversion Software's DEFCON forums, company co-founder Mark Morris admits that the Darwinia+ developer was close to closing up shop following disappointing sales of the game's XBLA port. "Internally we knew within about an hour of Darwinia+'s launch that it hadn't done well enough," Morris wrote. "It took us about two weeks to really accept that and the awful realisation that we didn't have enough to continue with the office or the staff. We had a bunch of creditors knocking at the door, but worse than all of that we were absolutely shattered." Having let its staff go, closed it office and retreated to the bedrooms of its three remaining employees, the company made a last-ditch move to generate some income. "We put together a rescue plan involving creating Steam achievements for DEFCON so we could convince Valve to run a promotion with it," explained Morris. Turns out, a seemingly small tweak and some promotion delivered major results, Morris revealed: "The promo exceeded all of our expectations and when combined with our low burn rate (no office or staff now) we had gone from being fearful about paying our mortgages to having a year's operating capital in the bank." Introversion is still running lean, but is back on track to release its "most ambitious project so far," Subversion, in 2011.
Rumor: Indie darling Darwinia to hit XBLA?
In some leftover scuttlebutt from GDC, word on the street is that the bad boys from Introversion, the independent developers that created indie-darling (and Independent Games Festival winner) Darwinia are working with the big boys in Redmond to get their game on the Xbox Live Arcade platform. Reasons why this is a logical move and a likely rumor: They've already gotten Darwinia on that other major digital distribution network (psst: it begins with "Stea" and ends with "m". Got it?) Uh, they've said they're interested. We know, everyone's interested. Fellow Steam-distributed developers Ritual Entertainment keep screaming about it, but they've got that whole enormous download thing to deal with. The XBLArcade blog points us to this video (.wmv) of SpikeTV's GameHead where Introversion's Mark Morris says, "... it's about 30 megs which makes it perfect for things like Live Arcade." CliffyB asks if they're planning on it and Morris responds, "I'm gonna try. Gonna talk to Microsoft and see what they say." XBLArcade correctly points out that if the developers of an award-winning and critically acclaimed independent game want to bring it to your platform, what do you say? Well, according to German blog Xbox Archiv, you say "Yes. Please." They claim to have overheard a conversation at GDC between the two parties. Let's hope that logic wins the day and we get another stellar entrant to Microsoft's walled-garden of Arcade treats.[Via Xbox 360 Fanboy]Read - XBLArcade Rumor RoundupRead - Darwinia for Xbox Live Arcade (Xbox Archiv machine translation)
