This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
In recent years I’ve watched talented, experienced colleagues — people with years under their belt — lose their jobs overnight. The game they were working on didn’t sell well enough, the studio shifted strategy, or the publisher pulled the funding. The games industry is hit-based.
In this context, the “classic” path — find a studio, work there, build a career — is less secure than it looks. It carries real risks that people often don’t factor in, because we’re conditioned to see a permanent contract as the gold standard of job security, especially here in Europe.
When you work for a company, you have a single client: that company.
If things go wrong for them, they go wrong for you too. When you work as a freelancer, you have multiple clients. Losing one is a problem, but it’s not the end. The risk is spread.
But freelancing isn’t something that just happens by itself. You have to build it deliberately, over time. You need a system: a way to find new clients, keep existing ones, and make yourself visible to people who don’t know you yet.
The crux of it is this: the right clients need to know you exist. Since you’re almost always under NDA, you can’t show the games you’ve been working on, you can’t mention the titles, sometimes you can’t even say who you’ve worked for. The portfolio — the main tool most creative professionals use to present themselves — becomes all but useless for us.
The simplest solution is the client testimonial.
When a project wraps up, before the collaboration closes for good, ask your client to write a few lines about you. Three sentences is enough: what you did, how it went, what they took away from it. What you get is the voice of someone who’s worked with you and can say, publicly, that you’re worth hiring.
It works because it lowers the perceived risk for a new client. Someone who doesn’t know you has no way to evaluate you directly. But if they can see that someone else has already done that evaluation for them — and had a positive experience — the leap of faith becomes much smaller.