and fast cars", but regret soon set in as they watched their income steadily decline, since "in the games industry, you make 75% of your total revenue for the product in the first 6 months". By December 2002, then-publisher Strategy First had stopped paying royalties for Uplink; they would later file a Consumer Proposal, but were acquired by Silverstar Holdings in early 2005. Even with the cash flow from direct sales, Introversion ran out of money in the middle of 2003. The company hovered on the edge of bankruptcy, with the team selling most of their worldly goods, as their second project and only hope for funds -- Darwinia -- "slipped relentlessly". Darwinia was eventually released in March 2005, but despite a strong opening weekend, sales soon slipped too low to sustain the company. Within six months, the developers were back on UK government benefits until November, when they contacted Valve "on a whim" to try to set up a digital distribution deal on their Steam platform. Valve responded enthusiastically and, following a 14 December 2005 online launch, digital sales, which exposed the game to a new, global audience, kept the company going through to the release of their third game, DEFCON. On 15 September 2006, the day DEFCON pre-orders were made available, Introversion spent their last £1500. Fortuitously, the game "did much much better than [they] ever imagined" and funds for at least the forthcoming twelve months quickly rolled in to replace it. Seemingly financially secure, the company place their eventual success largely at Valve's feet: "Steam has made Introversion a commercial success", Tom Arundel is quoted saying. By early 2010 the company was back in financial trouble. After spending over a year porting Darwinia+ to the Xbox 360, the game was not successful at launch. "It just really bombed. We missed the entire audience, I think", director Mark Morris said. The launch was in fact so poor, the company was able to tell in the first 10 minutes that it would not make enough money to save the company. At this time the company was so deeply in debt that by continuing operation the Directors faced criminal prosecution under UK insolvency law. "Tom (Arundel) spent a lot of time in those final days genuinely convinced that we were trading insolvently, probably trading insolvently, which is a criminal offense. So he was arguing that we needed to stop immediately,