How Firestoke wants to redefine publishing, one non-violent game at a time
Marie Dealessandri
Features Editor
Thursday 20th January 2022
Since his debut in the games industry in 1994, Paul Farley has had a successful and fulfilling career.
One of the three designers for the original Grand Theft Auto at DMA Design (which was soon to become Rockstar North), Farley went on to be lead game designer on State of Emergency at the late VIS Entertainment.
A pioneer in the mobile space, he then spent five years at Digital Bridges (later known as I-play) before co-founding Tag Games in 2006, one of the first developers to make games for iPhone and iPad, and a continued success story to this day.
While remaining chairman at Tag Games, he went on to head live games management platform ChilliConnect in 2018, which was sold to Unity in September 2019. He remained at the company until 2020, and then asked himself the all-important question: What next?
"I was probably not quite old enough to retire yet," he tells GamesIndustry.biz with a smile. "Thinking about what really inspired me, I got together with a couple people from Tag and we talked about the areas and trends within the games industry that were really exciting to us.
"There's still this incredible opportunity for publishers, and particularly the types of publisher that we always wanted as a developer"
"And one of those areas was very much the indie PC and console space, where we felt a lot of the innovation and creativity within the industry were occurring at the moment. We asked ourselves the question: What could we bring to the table that would be different? What would be compelling?
"I don't think we started with the idea that we'd be building a publisher at all. It was really open for a couple of months. As we started to explore and look at data, and talk
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