This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
If copying game mechanics and entire systems becomes trivially easy, what’s left that actually holds value? I think the answer lies in live operations.
I’m coming at this from a very concrete experience. Six months ago I had to write prompts to get LLM services to do what I needed. Then I moved on to drafting markdown files with detailed instructions. Today I can just record a video, talk through what I want while moving things around on screen, and that’s enough. Each step has lowered the bar for turning an idea into something that actually works — and I don’t see why it would stop there.
Which inevitably leads me to think we’re approaching a point where a progression system, a game loop, or a well-crafted mechanic can be replicated in a matter of days. Code and design ideas stop being a lasting advantage. What you can’t copy with a video, though, is the work that happens after launch: the seasonal events, the updates, the way you listen to your community, the relationship with the creators who tell your game’s story. Live operations are made of people and time, and time can’t be duplicated.
Something similar happened with music. Musicians went from playing live only, to playing on the radio, then to recording albums, and finally to digital platforms where they make practically nothing. How do you survive? By playing live. For them it was a return to the beginning — almost an unavoidable choice.
In our case, though, it’s an evolution, because nobody is forcing us to go back. The long-term winners are always the ones who manage to carve out a niche, to build their own audience. And this will only become more pronounced. Since dropping in new mechanics on the fly is becoming trivially easy, the real difference will show in the narrative that tomorrow’s studios know how to build with their audience as they go. I’m thinking of studios that document development as it happens, that show their decisions and their mistakes, that make players feel like part of a story still being written. Improvising a narrative means exactly that: building it together with people, day by day, rather than packaging it once before launch.
The game itself can be copied by anyone, sooner or later. First it was only companies of similar or greater size who could do it — now it’s genuinely anyone. The audience that follows you from the very beginning, on the other hand, can’t be duplicated.