I wish you and your family a merry Christmas and a happy 2026. I scheduled a couple of posts for key dates, but I will spend some day with my family in Italy so I will not post over here during two weeks.
See you next year, I hope you will find your “Zelda’s Lullaby”, your key for multiple solutions.
The story of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is my favorite tale of 2025. Every successful game is a little miracle, but this one has been very well documented also by the mainstream journalism. As they say, the luck arrives while you’re working hard and that’s the case for this game.
The initial spark comes from a single guy working afterwork on Unreal Engine just because the program was fun to use. Then he contacted with a colleague to get extra guidance, he looks for connection and thanks to that he manages to stay 1-2 years working extra hours to find a possible formula for his game. Effort and connection, these things are both very important to me. In fact, it’s extremely hard to work solo on a project over a long period of time after your normal day job.
The third person is a business guy, ex university colleague, to focus on investments. Again, the founder of Sandfall Interactive looks to make business from the start, and that’s something very few people do.
And then there is the luck: they post on Reddit and other platforms to manage to find artists and voice over actors to sell better the idea (again, sell sell sell). And they have the luck to find the right people at the right time. After many pitches that went wrong, they found their way. And then everybody knows how the story ended, big success.
To conclude today’s post, let’s talk about hope, which is the true fun part of making games (or better, making everything in general). Everybody dreams of getting prizes, but the real fun is in MAKING games, especially for us designers and developers. It’s a struggle, includes lots of highs and lows, and also financial difficulties often. But we still do it because of our passion and talent. That’s exactly the important part, not the outcome. The fact of being together with other people and creating something we believe will be awesome, that’s what we truly strive for. The outcome is a little miracle, and great to have it, but it’s not the important part.
One of the things I like the most about the games industry are the success stories. I like when people, for a reason or another, join together and achieve great success, higher than they expected. This possibility is one of the elements that keeps me within the games industry.
I am aware of the “survivorship bias” here, and I know that I cannot reproduce the success of others. I have been in enough projects to understand that every successful game is a little miracle. A combination of multiple factors. You cannot just follow guides and tips and be successful. And that’s exactly what I find attractive of this business.
When I celebrate concrete case studies over here is not to give false hopes to people. It’s not a “hey, look at them! they did that with few resources, you should do the same, it’s easy!”. Not at all.
It’s just that my LinkedIn feed in the last 2 years is filled with empty messages, sexy selfies, and bad news. And I just genuinely like to spread good news, and say “hey, everything is freaking hard, but I am a gamer and believe me: an epic win is always possible.”
I rewatched one of the most beautiful talks on the official GDC channel. It’s great because it evidences we need truly understanding and reach deep empathy with the players. I rewatched thanks to my bootcamp, I suggested this talk to my students.
We need to do the homework to improve as designers. We need to understand the games, especially the ones who are played by people that are different from us. It’s our job to understand players, and a necessary step for every game designer. Do your homeworks!
According to the popular marketing insight service Circana, on November this year the 3rd most sold console has been NEX Playground. In case you don’t know what it is, here’s the console.
The console is small and cubic, and has no controller. You play videogames like you did on XBOX Kinect years ago. The target audience is clear, the same as WII, families. The business model is subscription. You buy the console for around $250 and then you pay a monthly fee to get access to all games. The power, according to a recent interview of its company founder, is similar to a PS3. No next gen, no controller, simplicity at its best.
Will this console beat next gen consoles like PS6? No, of course not. But to me, the fact that has oversold XBOX for instance is a sign that:
Europe needs something like this, for me. Especially now that we are researching more on making our own chips to not be dependent on China, it would be great making our own console, as an excuse and for the chance of building our own Nintendo. I would probably target 10-13 preteens in full “obsession age” and make cool games. I would probably also add a simple 2 buttons controller for having better kinesthetics for whoever who doesn’t want to move.
The main feature, to me, should be that the console should work like old consoles: you turn ON and the game appears. No connections, no loadings, no system checks before it’s truly needed. It would be so cool to participate in a project like that!
I read the post from performance marketing expert Matej Lancaric on “fake ads”. With data, he demonstrated that big spenders do not care about fake ads, and they help to lower CPI (cost per install) for mobile games. Fake ads are regulated in other industries, not in mobile games.
From 200 real payers (including whales):
75% uninstall instantly when the game doesn’t match the ad
40% leave negative reviews
27% ask for refunds
But 17% of paying users STILL stay… and STILL spendAnd here’s the uncomfortable part nobody wants to admit:
Those 17% often represent 60–80% of total revenue in 4X, SLG, and Casino.Whales don’t care about fake ads.
Whales care about depth, progression, and competition.
And if fake ads drop your CPI from $60 → $15, the math wins. Every time.
The point here is that we, game creators, rely on algorithms to distribute our games nowadays. Speaking simply, a computer program decides on the visibility of our creations. We need to make good games but also think about how to trick the machine in order to make our craft arrive to the people. In the case of free-to-play the thing is worse because we need huge volume of people to find our real clients who are big spenders (described as “whales”, a term that comes from casinos).
The post doesn’t clarify WHY big spenders don’t care and fake ads spread rapidly. Also, it doesn’t explain what happens when people are exposed over a long period of time to fake ads. But we can make hypotheses:
I am still worried about those 75% of people who uninstall instantly. I mean, we are still paying for those people to install in first place. What if, instead of making fake stuff we make simple onboardings and put those into our fake ads? Maybe the conversion would be better and we could find more players.
As I am reading about another studio closure (I am sorry for the colleagues at SUPERVIVE), I am thinking on the distribution problem we have right now. I believe than on one hand you have to create a truly unique experience to have chances in this environment. Easier said than done, of course, because it’s a matter of taste and also realism. I worked on many derivative projects, and the leaders were absolutely sure of their uniqueness.
You need to put the right glasses on, and be extremely aware of your game unique selling points. A way to do that is by making business: if you’re not able to sell your game to publishers, if you don’t engage with players or other entities, you are on a dangerous track. We tend to look inside too much, when we should look outside and check if Players really have the same perception as us on the product. In this case, Players are also potential business partners.
I believe that videogames have still lots of margin for improvement, so we should stop repeating old formulas over and over and we should try to make a step forward.
Yesterday I wrote an introduction on LinkedIn because suddenly I got lots of new contacts due to my post on The Game Awards. I was taking care of things here at home and wrote that piece spontaneously, got much more traction than other times where I have the time of think and structure better my thoughts.
I got two new leads for clients, and the post shows nothing about my knowledge and skills, that is surprising. On the other side, the temptation to go always more personal and deep is strong.
I am sure that this is valid also for game making. If we create something that connects truly with us at a personal level, chances are we can achieve better results than making things just for the sake of business. It’s a delicate art, and it’s easy to believe to weak theories I am aware of that. But I am also aware that I have maybe 20 years of career in front of me and it would be better to spend them on something that truly matters.
While I am preparing my classes for this week, I have played the demo of Pragmata the new game by Capcom presented at The Game Awards. In Pragmata, you control a gunner with a little girl on his shoulder and you need to arrive from point A to point B solving spatial puzzles and destroying robots. To do that, you control the man to shoot at enemies and the little girl is a cyborg, capable of hacking the robots’ systems.
While you aim and shoot, then, you also have to move a cursor on a grid and solve simple puzzles. During the exploration you can find extra tiles for the grid that give you benefits (on damage, basically) and extra weapons for the man.
Pragmata is a game designed for people like me, 35+ year old, mostly male, who may or may not have children. The movement speed, the weapons feeling and the general pace reminds a lot of classic 2000s games, like Gears of War. The use of robots is savvy, because they are pretty slow compared with aliens for instance, so you have time to think in both the shooting and the puzzle. Capcom promises to publish a cool game, I am sold.
My feeling is that 2026 will be the year of people with the courage of creating new worlds and putting them out. We have not only tutorials, but plenty or resources to visualize and realize our dreams. To make them playable from people from all over the world. My feeling is that independent creators will benefit the most from recent technological advancements.
Of course, there are many factors that can influence the course of events so don’t take it as a prediction. I loved The Game Awards, I watched it with emotion, including some tears of joy and nostalgia. And the desire of helping build something memorable.
