Revolution Software: If it wasn’t for Apple, we would be dead by now

Broken Sword developer Revolution is celebrating its 25th birthday at Gamescom, but it almost didn’t make it this far.

Founder and industry luminary Charles Cecil says that working with publishers and retailers forced the firm to borrow money to survive, and that it was Apple’s decision to enter the games market that changed the studio’s fortunes.

Our lowest moment came around about 2006, 2007 and 2008, where the recoupment model was just not working for us at all,” Cecil told MCV @ Gamescom.

Retailers were making millions of dollars from the games that we wrote, publishers were making millions, but we were having to borrow money to help finish the game off. It kind of felt like there was nowhere to go.

Then Apple launched the iPhone. It contacted us pretty early on and invited us to write our games for its platform. And while it was not able to give us any sort of advance, the team there said that they would do their best to support the game.

Apple has been a fantastic advocate and ally, and I’m very grateful to it, because if that hadn’t happened, then Revolution would not have been able to survive.”

Revolution is at Gamescom this week promoting the Xbox One and PS4 versions of Broken Sword 5: The Serpent’s Curse, which arrives on September 4th.