Richard Cockayne
Selling strategy to an arcade audience
Co-founder of PSS in Coventry, whose Tobruk, Bismarck and Battlefield Germany brought serious wargaming to the Spectrum and Amstrad — and who identified the commercial problem precisely: buyers could not yet tell a strategy game from an arcade one.
Richard Cockayne co-founded PSS with Gary Mays, running a Coventry house whose catalogue was built on something almost nobody else was selling to home-computer owners: wargames.
Amstrad Action photographed the pair together in March 1986 and interviewed them about a release schedule that ran to Tobruk in March and Bismarck in April, each offering the player either side of a real Second World War campaign.
The problem he named
Cockayne’s contribution to that interview is a diagnosis rather than a boast. His observation was that buyers had not yet learned to tell arcade from strategy — and for a publisher selling the second thing into a market conditioned by the first, that is the whole commercial difficulty in one sentence.
It explains PSS’s positioning. A wargame competing on a shelf against Commando is not competing on quality; it is competing for a customer who may not know the category exists.
Why it matters here
PSS is one of the few British houses of the period whose output assumed an adult buying a game to think about rather than to react to. That the company’s own founder identified audience education — not development, not distribution — as the binding constraint is a useful corrective to the assumption that eighties publishing problems were all technical or financial.