in spite of it, secured him the job of managing director. By way of a thanks, Sefton bought his friend who’d seen the original job ad a Nintendo Wii. “Because it really did change my life,” he says. “Otherwise I was going to have to freelance from Yorkshire.”
THE APP-ENING Sefton sank himself into the role immediately; as he characterises it “by giving it a rocket up the backside.” He reached out to contacts and talked them into taking a train north to talk about PR, media and publishing. Another early target was Apple: “The App Store had just started and I just thought I’m just going to harass Apple until we get a meeting with them. Bless him, David Currall, who is no longer with us and was just absolutely lovely, came up to meet our companies and it was transformational.”
“Game Republic exists because of the games companies. They set it up to be a louder voice and to access funding and just basically share ... and because people are so generous and friendly in the region, it really works.”
Among the studios that brought their games to mobile was York’s Revolution Software, which managed to sell 160,000 copies of the first Broken Sword game during its first year on the App Store, earning the developer ten times the amount from each sale that it enjoyed when the series was shifting more than a million big- box copies in the nineties. “Charles Cecil has basically said that it saved the
company and turned their fortunes around,” says Sefton. “That early relationship with Apple was vital for all our companies because 2008, 2009 was a very tricky time. The smaller publishers were falling by the wayside a little bit and it was all being taken over by digital stores and I was right in the middle, helping our companies to get on the App Store and Android as well. It was really nice to help the Yorkshire companies make that change.”
April/May 2023 MCV/DEVELOP | 37
GREAT EXPO-TATIONS Another contact to receive a call from Game Republic’s eager new force-of-nature was Rupert Loman, then still heading up a pre-ReedPop Gamer Network. With Yorkshire having never hosted a major gaming event, Sefton went down to Brighton to pitch the idea of the Eurogamer Expo – which had debuted in London in 2008 – coming to Leeds in 2009. With Screen Yorkshire pledging to cover the venue costs it was perhaps an easy sell, but also something of a success, with the Leeds event proving to be just as popular as it had been in the capital the previous year. In addition, with the Leeds event preceding a subsequent London event by a few days, Sefton found himself fielding the lion’s share of the media coverage. “We got the BBC covering it and I was live on GMTV
with Ellie Gibson,” he recalls. “We were both bricking it because we were doing live interviews in front of four million people. But the coverage we got was brilliant and
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