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Number of players : Doubled
Posted by Chris
on Mon Dec 05, 2011 6:09 pm |
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As we pass 180,000 sales of the Humble Introversion Bundle, I can’t help but feel astonished. This is the biggest single sale Introversion has ever done on any platform, even beating the epic Steam promotions we run from time to time. It roughly equates to one sale every six seconds. And the best part of all - the part that makes me most happy, is that this promotion has doubled the number of people who have played our games. 180,000 is more copies than our best selling game Darwinia ever sold, and the Humble Bundle includes all four of our games, so that means twice as many people have now played each of our games than before the bundle. That’s pretty cool. As the principle game creator here at Introversion, that’s the biggest thing for me.
And let’s not mess around, the revenue is pretty good too. When it’s all divided up we’ll see about one quarter of the total revenue you see on the Humble site - and I’m sure Humble won’t mind us revealing that, because it’s obvious if you’ve look at the default sliders. That’s one quarter of a pretty big number, and that revenue will keep us going for a long while. And we’ve done it while raising over $200k for some very worthy charities.
If you haven’t bought it yet, please take this opportunity before time runs out. You get Desura keys for all the Introversion games now, along with Steam keys and the source code to all our games. The Subversion tech demos in particular are only available through this bundle - they will not be on sale anywhere else once the promotion is over. This is your only chance to get your hands on them. One of the things that drew us to the bundle was the possibility of releasing tech demos - because we thought all our Subversion tech was going to rot in a box somewhere and never see the light of day. The structure of the Humble deal lends itself well to experimental releases like this, and I’d love to see more developers willing to release their “failed but cool” prototypes. So please, buy the bundle and help support Introversion.
It’s taken us a long while to bring this together. We first chatted to the Humble guys way back in March, and discussed the possibility of an Introversion bundle over a round of Disk Golf in San Francisco’s Golden Gate park. It may not be widely realised just how much work goes into something like the Humble Bundle - many people probably think we just hand our game installers over and it’s done in a week or two. The reality is that we’ve produced new and updated versions of all the games on all three platforms, as well as getting the tech demos ready for release, and producing video rushes for the Humble guys to make their awesome promotional videos. On top of all of that, we also had the treasure hunt and the Prison Architect timelapse video to launch at the same time, all of which had to be ready in advance. Behind the scenes, we moved our entire website over to Amazon Web Services in order to handle the inevitable load spike we’d experience on the big launch day. We also knew we’d be cramming during September and October to get the IGF submission of Prison Architect ready, and to cap all that off both Mark and myself had children around the same time! The Humble guys got quite used to hearing our babies crying during our frequent skype calls. We even prepared a talk for GDC about Subversion's failure and the subsequent rise of Prison Architect from the ashes, but alas the GDC organisers didn't bite and we were turned down. Our one failure! But we’ve had an incredible pace at Introversion for the last few months now, and it’s feeling really good.
And Wil Wheaton donating and tweating about us? It may seem like an odd highlight given the massive success of this bundle, but Star Trek : The Next Generation was a massive show for me and Mark when we were teenagers. I used to watch it literally every evening, thanks to endless nightly repeats on Sky Tv. Having a character from that show - Wesley Crusher - directly messaging us is like being contacted from another world, one that has never previously been accessible. I guess that’s the power of twitter, it doesn’t obey the usual actor/viewer divide. Mark says he actually met Wil Wheaton once at a Star Trek convention, but he was too star struck to open his mouth. So you’ll understand why when Will says “thank you for making such wonderful games. Uplink has consumed my life!” on Twitter, it’s quite a big deal.
(What did happen to Wesley Crusher anyway? After his failed starburst stunt he dropped out of college and then levelled up into some sort of demi-god with bullet time powers? It’s never been fully clear to me.)
Big thanks to everyone who has bought the bundle already. Stay in touch for more updates.
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Introversion Love Linux
Posted by Mark
on Thu Dec 01, 2011 8:20 pm |
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We’ve been enjoying a massive response to our Humble Introversion Bundleand we noticed a continuing theme relating to Desura. We were planning on getting in touch with those guys, but the number of requests for Desura keys to be included in the bundle spurred us on and we’re pleased to announce that we completed the fastest distribution deal in IV’s history and all our games are now available on the Desura platform for PC and Linux, and all Humble customers will be able to activate the games on Desura, by grabbing the key from the humble download page.
Allthough Desura is cross-platform it was the Linux take up that interested us the most. We’ve always had a great affinity with the Linux guys. Right at the start we knew that Uplink was going to appeal to the hacker inside every Linux user and we got a port out as soon as we could. A couple of days later we learnt about web resilience the hard way when Slashdot ran the story about our Linux hacking game and absolutely pwnd the IV site for about a week.
More recently we took the decision to really scrub up all of our Linux ports to give the best possible service we could. Specifically, we updated all four games to the latest Linux libraries and all our language translations and game updates are now included. We prepared 32 bit and 64 bit rpms and debs, as well as nix installers for each game - we know you Linux guys love having choice. 20 packages later, we were ready to launch into the Humble Bundle and once again we have been overwhelmed by the response with Linux users spending more on the bundle than the Mac community and having an average donation running at almost three times that of the PC players. Thanks Guys!
We also know Linux users love tinkering with the source code so we’ve decided to release that as well for all our games. We can’t grant the right to release versions of the games on other platforms because this is something that we want to do ourselves, but if this is something you’re really keen to do, drop us a line and we’ll see if we can sort something out. For instance If you show us a working Pandora version we’re not going to stop you launching, but we’ll need to have a conversation first. We’re tackling all the IOS versions ourselves though, so we won’t be granting licenses for this 
So one last thing - we will be continuing to support Linux in the future and we promise to have a Linux version of Prison Architect alongside Mac and PC.
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Prison Architect : Revealed!
Posted by Chris
on Wed Nov 30, 2011 12:45 pm |
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Our secret treasure hunt has concluded, and has revealed our first Prison Architect video. We hope you like it - please spread the word, tweet it, link it, google+ it. Most of all, enjoy it, and be sure to watch it in HD fullscreen, it makes quite a difference.
We like our dark themes here at Introversion, and this one has been particularly hard to get right. Prisons are an emotive and political issue, and if mishandled a game about prisons would probably be a very uncomfortable experience. We think we’ve got the feel about right. Many people have correctly identified our big influences for this project in Dwarf Fortress and Dungeon Keeper, or just about anything by Bullfrog. We love those games so much, and mixing their mechanics with a topic like prisons has been an incredibly satisfying creative challenge.
Back in October we worked crazily hard to produce a build of Prison Architect we were satisfied with (albeit an early version of the game), and submitted that build to the IGF for judgement. If you’re an IGF judge or jury and you haven’t yet played Prison Architect, please give it a look.
For those that didn’t realise, Introversion has been running a secret treasure hunt for the past week since the Humble Bundle launched, embedding images from Prison Architect in the Subversion tech demos and sending others out to a few select journalists. The five polaroids fit together to produce a string of characters, which leads to a hidden Prison Architect website. Well done to everyone who found the various images and in particular to the Introversion hardcore who meticulously documented every polaroid sighting in this forum thread. A special mention must go to blacknova404, who was the first to find the secret video. Well done sir - we’re sending you a full set of everything from the Introversion collection, including boxed copies of all our games, posters and soundtracks. Gratz!
Here is the full set of polaroids we used. Click the thumbnail to see them fullsize. We would like to introduce Ryan Sumo as our resident Prison Architect artist - he’s the man responsible for these incredible story polaroids, as well as all of the game graphics you see in the video above. Ryan first came to our attention because of his work in Spacechem, and we think he’s amazingly talented. With a theme like prisons we knew we needed a highly skilled artist to convey the gravity of the story and the inner thoughts of our characters, and we’ve really enjoyed working with him on this project.
The first previews of Prison Architect are starting to appear:
- Pc Gamer (UK) has an article about the game in this months mag based on playing the first level, which has been reprinted online here. Our favourite quote : “It’s probably the darkest tutorial I’ve ever played”.
- Rock Paper Shotgun have also been playing the game and have just posted an article about it here.
All of this information will be going up on our official website soon : www.prison-architect.com
We’d also like to say a big thank you to the literally hundreds of thousands of people who have just bought our games via the Humble Bundle. This has been the best promotion we’ve ever done, both in terms of the number of games sold and also the money raised. As of yesterday the Humble Bundle now includes the complete source code to all four of our games, as well as Dungeons of Dredmor, Aquaria and Crayon Physics Deluxe if you beat the average price (currently about $4). That’s on top of all four of our games and two Subversion tech demos! If you haven’t bought this yet please consider donating - you can pay whatever you like and time is running out. One third of your money goes to some very worthy charities and you’ll be supporting Introversion as we continue to develop our next games.
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Announcing the Humble Introversion Bundle
Posted by Chris
on Tue Nov 22, 2011 6:00 pm |
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About a month ago we announced that we had put Subversion on ice. We really struggled to find a good game in Subversion, and we ultimately felt we had no choice but to shelve it for that simple yet unavoidable reason. A new game called Prison Architect was born from the ashes, and we will be talking more about that soon.
One thing that was very cool about Subversion was the technology we developed for it. We spent months tinkering with procedural city generators and voxel systems. We spent so long tinkering with technology that we literally forgot to make a game. We’ve no regrets whatsoever in cancelling Subversion, but we do very much regret that all of that awesome technology we developed will simply never see the light of day.
Until now. We are releasing that technology for you to play with, and we are doing it today. In fact it’s already done. If you are so inclined, you can own our Procedural City Generator, and our Voxel Physics demo, right now. And the best part is you can pay whatever you feel it’s worth to you - give us just a cent if you like, or your life savings. Or something in-between.
Introducing the Humble Introversion Bundle. Introversion has teamed up with the Humble boys to bring you the deal of Introversion’s lifetime. In this bundle you will find all four of Introversion’s classic games - Uplink, Darwinia, DEFCON and Multiwinia, as well as the awesome soundtracks for Darwinia and DEFCON. You can name your price, and all the games come for Pc, Mac, Linux and Steam. In addition, if you pay above the average price you will also receive the IGF grand prize winning classics Aquaria and Crayon Physics Deluxe. That’s three IGF grand prize winners in one bundle! And a (customisable) third of your donation will be split between two charities - the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Child’s Play charity.
We know a lot of Introversion fans probably own our games already, and we wanted to include something specifically for you guys as a token of our appreciation. We’ve included two tech demos created during the Subversion years that we think you will find very interesting. These tech demos are Windows only.
The first is our procedural city generator, originally built to provide the “campaign map” for Subversion in which the game would take place. This tech demo can generate massive and detailed cities in just a few minutes, and no two cities will ever be the same - the whole thing is generated randomly right there on your system. Alternatively at the start of the tech demo you can enter a seed value which will generate a city deterministically based on that seed - try your name, or your girlfriends name, or your cats name, or whatever you like. Tweet us @IVsoftware if you find interesting city layouts - we love to hear what other people have created with our tech. Here’s a vid showing the city generator in action:
The second demo is our Voxel Physics system. You can read the original blog post about this project here. This was a brilliantly fun side project that mixed a Minecraft style voxel engine with some realtime physics, and then added rocket launchers. Left click to destroy blocks, right click to fire a rocket which will destroy even more blocks. There’s loads of options to play with so have fun.
Curious where our City Generator came from? Read all about the gestation of it in these blog posts spanning several years:
http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?t=586
http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?t=733
http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?t=1132
http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?t=1837
If you approve of the Humble Introversion Bundle please help us to spread the word as far and as wide as possible! Like it, tweet it, Google+ it, even tell your friends verbally. And make sure you are signed up to our channels to hear all the Introversion news first.
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