This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
During the free-to-play mobile boom, this corner of the games industry was quickly taken over by product management. In a way, that makes sense — the free-to-play business revolves around player acquisition, which means performance marketing. If the cost to acquire a player is lower than what that player spends on average in the game, you’ve got a working business.
So, working as a game designer in those companies very often became a conversation purely grounded in data. I myself repeatedly found myself arguing with my bosses over things we could summarise as: my taste VS the current state of the market. A practical example: if I — as a designer — felt that a certain fantasy needed to be expressed through specific mechanics because I had a hunch it would work, the default response was: “okay, and where have you seen this? In which other games?” Very often it was something that came from a personal experience, or something else entirely. Maybe an app, a film, or an exhibition I’d visited had sparked an idea. Nothing doing — I had to find a way, absolutely, to back it up with data.
And in fact, the designers who built the most successful careers in that sector very often describe themselves as data-driven. They know how to research what’s already there in successful games and reapply it like a mathematical formula to whatever they’re working on. Fair enough — it’s a real skill. But to me, a designer must have both a sense of the business context and a genuine taste. If we’re going to put this much energy into something, we might as well create something new — put something of ourselves into it. People notice when you actually have something to say.
I think this is our moment, right now. This is the moment for designers who want to express their own taste. In my opinion, data-driven design is dead. It was always repetitive, not particularly creative work, but I believe that in the age of AI — where an agent does all of that in far less time and at a fraction of the cost — we’re better off cultivating our own taste instead. Better to watch films, study different kinds of apps, go to exhibitions. Better, in short, to genuinely search for our own voice.
What I believe in — and have always believed in — is data-informed design. Any self-respecting designer should always try to empathise with their players, and there’s no better way to do that than collecting data. But that data shouldn’t dictate our taste, or else we’ll always be offering horses to people who need something new — like selling carriages in Henry Ford’s time. A designer can’t fly blind.
But a game designer needs to have the freedom to create, to bring something genuinely new into the world. Hiring people to repeat formulas is absurd, and I think that practice is destined to disappear — because now we have the right algorithm. One that lets us focus on what truly matters.