54 GENIUS INTERVIEW George Osborn
FEED: Can you tell us about the work you were doing before you
started Games4EU?
GEORGE OSBORN: I used to work as the head of content for a mobile advertising company. But it was a start-up, and you know what happens with start-ups. They start high and then they come crashing down to earth. As it came down to earth, I was about to make the shift over to becoming a freelance writer, and I started working with companies like Pocket Gamer and their events, and started writing content for a whole range of different game sites. Now I run my own content marketing business, Go Editorial, and I work with a variety of companies on a lot of different projects, helping publishers do their community management or helping companies produce content.
FEED: So how did Games4EU come about?
GEORGE OSBORN: What happened was that, alongside all that, I’m also a political animal: I became a political animal after the Brexit vote. It was 24 June 2016, the morning after the referendum, and I was obviously staggered by the result.
FEED: Why “obviously staggered” by the result?
received a call from a European client who said, “Well, you know, we’ve been paying you in euros up until now, but we can start paying you in pounds.” This was after the pound had tanked by about 10% to 15% that morning. Suddenly it was the realisation: this is what this means for the country. We are now going to lose our position of power and we are going to lose leverage, and it’s going to make it harder for us to do business in the long term. So I joined a political party and worked at it from that angle. But then there was the People’s Vote march in London in
June 2018. I went there and saw that there were loads of other people from the video games industry along, too. But there was no group organising us together. So I ended up speaking with Tracey McGarrigan who was on that march. She’s the co-founder of the PR agency Ansible Communications.
GEORGE OSBORN: Because no one had really expected that. All of the build-up had been that this would be a comfortable win for Remain. The campaigns hadn’t gone brilliantly for the Remain side, but the pollsters had been indicating Remain would probably win it. So to wake up to the Leave vote the following morning – and my network of friends would not necessarily have been the kind of people who would have voted Leave – I really hadn’t seen it coming. The thing that turned me much more political was, later that same day, I
FEED: So you were just walking along at the march and had a chat
about Brexit?
GEORGE OSBORN: I’d already seen her on Twitter tweeting about it. So a few days after the march, I shot her over an email saying, “It was good to see you out there, but there wasn’t a group. Do you think we should maybe put some work into founding one?” And she said: “Yes, that sounds like a great idea.” We ended up organising a morning brunch at Develop Conference, which is in July in Brighton. Lawyer Jas Purewal (digital entertainment lawyer and founder of Purewal & Partners) was one of the people who came along. Jas gave us the legal and policy support to have the
THE RESEARCH INDICATED THAT ABOUT A THIRD OF PEOPLEWORKING IN THE BRITISH VIDEO GAMES INDUSTRY ARE EU NATIONALS
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