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Author: Paolo

From The Finals to the front lines

Published by Paolo on 15/11/2025

Here is the weekly rundown of industry news and my thoughts:

1. Steam’s Home Console Play

The news about new hardware devices from Steam makes one thing clear: they are aggressively attempting to erode the distinction between PC and Console to win the battle for the home living room.

I can’t predict if their strategy will ultimately work, but if I were Sony, I would focus my energy elsewhere. Sony is proven to be exceptionally good at narrative-driven, high-fidelity single-player experiences. You only need to look at the sales figures for games like Ghost of Tsushima (or Ghost of Yotei, if that is the internal name you meant)—that caliber of experience is Sony’s real golden goose. They should double down on what they master.

2. Embark Studios: Practical AI Integration

Another interesting news item this week comes from Embark Studios (developers of Arc Raiders and The Finals). They appear to have found a cool, practical way to integrate AI into their development process.

This is exactly what I like to see: No hype, just pure gameplay utility. They released a world-class game, and they’ve released useful tools for the community. Embark is positioning itself as one of the most promising development realities here in Europe.

3. The AI & War Reflection

On a more sobering note, a friend recently sent me an Instagram post detailing new tactics adopted by the Russian invaders in Ukraine. This led me to a chilling thought:

Perhaps we are seeing so much investment in AI for games because games are essentially a free and unregulated territory to train models made for war. The complex environment, the decision-making under pressure, and the dynamic systems found in games provide perfect training grounds for military AI development. It’s a sobering perspective on the intersection of our entertainment and global conflict.

Offline networking

Published by Paolo on 14/11/2025

Here is one of the advices I give to people trying to break into the industry: make sure you constantly meet people in real life.

Instead of staying at home preparing and sending résumés to dozens of applications, it is far better to spend two hours per day outside, perhaps at the gym or at a local course on something entirely unrelated to games.

This approach offers three crucial advantages:

1. Maintain Human Energy

You keep your energy levels high because you are meeting and talking with real humans, not just staring at a screen. Waiting for a response to an online application is passive and draining; engaging with the world is active and vital.

2. Design for Reality

When you meet people outside your professional bubble, you gain invaluable insight into their context. I often use these interactions to think about game design.

For example, I currently attend a Catalan language course twice a week. The class is full of nurses and public service workers who are there primarily to get a better contract, not necessarily to master the language. I notice they are tired, easily bored, and don’t want too much complication. Their lives are already full, balancing jobs and children.

How would I entertain someone like them? Not with a complex console game, right? They need a simple casual game, but it has to load fast and get straight into the gameplay. This helps me stay in touch with reality. It forces me to design for the actual, busy human being, not the idealized, endless-time “gamer.”

3. Unlock Lateral Opportunities

You significantly increase your chance of finding job opportunities in lateral sectors by meeting people who have nothing to do with the virtual bubble you’ve created in your online networks.

I honestly have the feeling that nowadays, it is often easier to find a job by going to the gym than by applying on LinkedIn.

Kondō and Synesthesia

Published by Paolo on 13/11/2025

I recently read a fascinating article on Enhance, the Japanese developer behind Tetris Effect and Lumines: Arise. Their company vision is, simply put, a breath of fresh air:

“Experience is king, synesthesia is queen.”

Synesthesia—the involuntary experience generated by stimulating one sensory pathway—and the concept of Kondō (to move emotionally) are the core of their design process.

I have a huge weak spot for companies with this kind of vision. They are hard to execute, but they make so much sense to me.

We are currently living in the era of the product managerization of game design, where every creative decision is filtered through short-term metrics. These experience-first points of view come like a breath of fresh air, reminding us of the original purpose of our craft.

We are humans making entertainment. Focusing solely on automation and metric-driven tuning can make us forget the human spark that creates great things.

Intense design discussions, deep conceptualization, and messy prototyping—that’s what I strive for.

Enhance starts by making music and then breaking that music down into pieces to design the right stages (levels). It is an inverted process that prioritizes the sensory and emotional outcome. It’s so interesting; I wish I could be in that room to see it.

Structured work

Published by Paolo on 12/11/2025

The other day, I was reflecting on how I carved out my space in this industry.

Today, that reality has changed. I have other responsibilities, and I can no longer dedicate the same time to my work. My energy levels aren’t what they were 15 years ago. I worked extremely hard to secure the professional space and flexibility I have now.

I still engage with the medium: I play games, about two hours a week, and spend my evenings studying books and taking online courses. Lately, I’ve been particularly focused on the history of games.

Otherwise, I dedicate my energy to activities outside of the games industry. My passion successfully evolved into a job, and ultimately, a job is a job. With time, one has to work less not more.

The studio lie

Published by Paolo on 11/11/2025

Tim Plöger on LinkedIn shared a critique of the glib advice given to laid-off developers: “You got fired? Then start your own studio!”. This message often gets mixed up, confusing the business problem with the craft problem.

Tim, coming from a focus on the structural and financial side of the industry, correctly points out that starting a studio is not the answer. A studio isn’t just about making games; it’s about allocating people and financials, legal structuring, and sales. That’s a different type of work, and often, a recipe for quick failure for someone whose expertise is in pure creation.

The advice tells you to become an Executive/CEO when all you need to do is remain a Designer/Developer. My counterpoint to Tim was simple: “You don’t have money to buy bread? Well, maybe you have it to buy flour and cook your own bread.”

If your job is to design games, your energy should go into designing games. Spending six months, a year, or even two years sending out résumés without a response drains your energies. It is better to do your job every single day than to beg others while your energy wanes.

When you are laid off, you are given a clean slate, a golden opportunity to build the things you need.

Cook Your Own Bread

You have the chance to prove your adaptive insight (your ability to transfer design knowledge across genres). Here are three immediate actions for any designer, artist, or programmer who is waiting for “the next job”:

Stop Applying, Start Prototyping: Turn your application time into creation time. Build simple, fast, collaborative projects. Don’t worry about polish; worry about fun and flow.
Master the Instincts of the Market: Use this time to apply System Thinking. Pick a successful micro-genre (like the recent Friend-slop games) and try to replicate its core loop. Don’t copy the art; map the instincts (Acquisition, Gregariousness, Escape) that make it tick. This process demonstrates analytical skill far better than any résumé.
Join the Flour-Buyers: Seek out other developers who are also “baking their own bread.” Join forces for a focused, two-week game jam or prototype challenge. The goal is not profit; the goal is to keep your creative engine running and generate concrete work that proves you’re a builder, not a waiter.

The best way to get hired is to be actively doing the job, with or without a corporate logo on your title.

Believe, don’t expect

Published by Paolo on 10/11/2025

I spoke with a former client this week about an experiment we ran. The results are good. The concrete indicators, the raw KPIs, show definite potential.

Yet, the project is under fire. Why? Because the team leader, who has to defend the project to business stakeholders every week, told me: “The expectations were higher.”

This is how good games die unfairly.

You execute a clear vision, the indicators are positive, but because they are “not great” or don’t match someone’s projection, the people who only chase numbers pull the plug.

The Fatal Confusion: KPI vs. Goal

This happens because many business owners—many, many of them—confuse indicators (KPIs) with goals.

A KPI is a health report. It tells you where you are bleeding or thriving right now. A good CPI or a solid retention rate is a sign that the game’s core has validity.
A Goal is the destination. It’s the vision, the human spark that creates something great.

The biggest mistake is treating the KPI as the Goal.

When you confuse the current retention rate with the final vision, you kill the process. You are demanding a marathon runner win the race on the first lap.

Think of every successful game out there: most of them started small. They grew with patience, dedication, and the belief that the spark was there. They iterated, they built, and they compounded their small, good indicators into great results.

ROI Without Understanding is Ruin

People in charge look for their own immediate ROI without being willing to truly understand how creative work, especially game design I have to say, actually works.

Creativity is not a linear spreadsheet. It’s a system of feedback and refinement. It requires room to breathe. When you cancel a project with good, but not great, indicators, you are sacrificing future compounding success for the shallow comfort of hitting an immediate number.

Let’s start the week with a clear intention: Stop letting fear-driven number-chasers kill projects that deserve to grow. Believe in the spark.

Strategy as a creative act

Published by Paolo on 09/11/2025

Martin Walfisz, founder of Massive Entertainment and writer of the Connecting Pixels newsletter, recently hit a crucial nerve: Most game companies have ambition, but no clear strategy.

He talks about how, when he started out, his ambition was just “Explosions must look amazing!“. I see this same pattern everywhere. Most teams are building a feature-collage that relies on luck rather than design. The core problem is exactly what Walfisz identifies: we confuse motion with direction.

Ambition is Easy; Strategy is Courage

Ambition is a resume: “This game will be the best in the world, it will hit X million MAU, and it will have blockchain integration.” Ambition is free. Everyone has it.

Strategy, by contrast, is courage. Strategy is saying NO to the 99 good ideas so you can focus on the one great thing that your game, and only your game, is built to master.

Walfisz nails the essence: “Strategy is about deciding where to become great.”

Ambition asks: “What else can we add to appeal to everyone so we can make lots of money?”
Strategy asks: “What will we say no to, so we can double down on this one, unique feeling that respects the player’s time?”

Companies fear that choosing a lane will limit their creative freedom. But as Walfisz notes, it’s the opposite: boundaries don’t stifle creativity, they sharpen it.

Success Should Compound, Not Reset

When you build a game purely on ambition, its success is a lottery win. Walfisz points out the high cost of this: “Without a clear strategy, success doesn’t compound. It resets.”

If your strategy changes with every new project you are throwing away the expertise, the audience loyalty, and the pattern recognition you earned on the last project.

Success must become a pyramid built on the cumulative expertise of your team, not a single, isolated pillar of luck.

Look at the example of Landfall, which Walfisz cites: they were self-aware enough to realize their strength was “creating inventive, funny, highly shareable multiplayer experiences.” They focused on that one thing and restructured their studio around it. That is the definition of turning your culture into your strategy.

The 100 hours weeks

Published by Paolo on 08/11/2025

Michail Katkoff, founder of the brilliant Deconstructor of Fun podcast, recently made an uncomfortable but valid point about 996: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six-days-a-week schedule.

He argues that when you’re early in your career, time is your only leverage. You don’t have the pattern recognition yet. The only way to earn that wisdom, like a surgeon or an investment banker, is through sheer, brutal volume. He says you must work hard before you can work smart.

I agree with him. Volume builds experience, and experience is the only thing that separates the dreamers from those who achieve mastery. But there’s a crucial distinction that separates self-sacrifice from exploitation.

Back in 2014, I was staring at a resume with two incomplete projects. I had lost my second job as a game designer. The industry was already demanding a commitment I hadn’t delivered. It was the turning point where I decided: I am going to stay in this industry, no matter the cost.

The cost was high. Achieving what I have now required working more than 100 hours a week. That is the hard truth of earning my space in this sector. I was fortunate to have a wonderful family who provided emotional and financial support; without them, it would have been impossible.

However, I have never accepted working more than eight hours a day for someone else. I have the luxury of being supported emotionally and economically from my family. The story would have been different otherwise.

This is the critical difference:

996 for the Company is often a management failure masked as ambition. It’s an unsustainable practice where you burn your hours and your health to deliver someone else’s messy vision. It’s exploitation, pure and simple.
100 Hours for Yourself is like hard training, instead. It means building your own systems, and your future.

When I was rebuilding my career, I was awake before dawn, spending my days working intensively and alone. I discovered Michail’s podcast, taking notes at night. I developed my own systems, my own frameworks, and my own unique pattern recognition.

I was working for my competence. I was working to build my own gate so that I could one day invite the market in, rather than begging for access. I couldn’t skip the hours and the volume. I am sure that it’s not the only way, but it’s the one that avoids most of the risks.

Designing for the Great Conjunction

Published by Paolo on 06/11/2025

Chris Zukowski, the industry analyst behind How To Market A Game, recently published an optimistic take: indie development is in a “Great Conjunction.”

He argues that a perfect storm is brewing: genres that are “easier to make” are also the genres that Steam players are desperately hungry for. This creates a low-risk, high-upside scenario for small teams to release rapid, viral hits like Friend-slop co-op games or Horror-Casino hybrids.

But simply chasing the “Friend-slop” or “Idle Game” trend is the lazy route. A true designer knows that success is not just about the genre, but the transferability of insight, meaning the system behind the mechanics.

If you are going to take advantage of this “Great Conjunction,” you need to know why these genres are working. You need to identify the core human instincts they are satisfying.

The Designer’s Roadmap: Mapping the Great Conjunction

In my experience, the foundation of every successful game is not the graphic style or the business model, but its ability to satisfy a primal human need.

Here is a practical framework, using Instinct Mapping (the concept of identifying the core Survival and Social instincts a game satisfies) to deconstruct the “Great Conjunction” genres. I am writing a book on this topic, so stay tuned:

Great Conjunction Genre (Zukowski)	My Instinct Mapping Proxy	Primary Instincts (The “Why”)	The Design Hook (The “How”)
Idle / Incremental Games	Idle Game	Acquisition, Rest, Building	The player gets a continuous drip-feed of Acquisition (loot/progress) with minimal effort, justifying the Rest (downtime) and satisfying the need to passively Build a growing system.
Friend-slop Co-op (e.g., Lethal Company)	Party Game	Gregariousness, Play, Laughter	The core loop is dedicated entirely to Gregariousness (social connection) and unconstrained Play, with the physics or design chaos used to trigger Laughter. Human interaction is the feature, not the polish.
Horror Meta-Genre	Horror	Escape, Curiosity, Rest	The challenge (Horror) is driven by the thrill of Escape and the pull of Curiosity (what’s around the next corner?). The ‘Rest’ is the temporary moment of safety (e.g., hiding, a brief safe zone). The Horror-Casino genre simply layers this instinct over Acquisition.
Autobattler / Strategy	Autobattler	Assertiveness, Combat, Play	The player’s success relies on Assertiveness (making the strategic decision) and Combat (the resulting conflict), packaged as a simple, repeatable loop of Play that allows for quick experimentation.

The Formula: Market + Instinct

The success of these rapidly developed indie games proves that players will overlook polish and graphics if the core design loop is tight, fun, and deep.

Your task as a designer is two-fold:

Analyze the Market (The ‘What’): Identify the “hot quadrant” in the Game Business Matrix (Session Time $\times$ Player Interaction) where there’s a confluence of hunger and low cost (like those mentioned by Zukowski).
Design the Instinct (The ‘Why’): Deconstruct what primal need that market is tapping into, and use the instincts (like Acquisition or Gregariousness) to structure your Opening (hook), Core loop, and Closing (satisfaction).

Don’t be a martyr for a years-long art project when the market is begging for focused, fun systems built quickly. Use the Great Conjunction, but design with a framework. That’s how you turn a trend into a sustainable victory.

Beyond your resume

Published by Paolo on 05/11/2025

Companies and investors look at the past experience of a candidate or an entrepreneur to determine if the person is right for the position or investment. This makes sense because you want to reduce risks as much as you can. Having people with concrete experience on something working on that something gives at least the feeling that they can do it well.

In the case of game design, this translates to genres and platforms. Companies look for economy designers who have worked on idle RPGs, for instance. Investors will probably fund ex-Riot people to make a new MOBA game for the US market.

But if you are a real game designer, you can work on different genres. I mean, if you know the basics of problem identification, audience, deconstructing mechanics, and so on, you can work on a platform game for PS5 even if you previously worked on casual match-3 games for mobile. We are not finding the cure for cancer, right?

In most cases, the only way of proving this capacity is alone or in a game jam. It’s hard to be hired by a company in a completely different environment. But the reality is that there are fashions, and maybe that popular genre in your area becomes uninvested, and you have to reinvent yourself.

How to do that? I prefer to start by applying my past experiences to the new challenges. The capacity to adapt insight and look at everything as a system is key. And it is a talent, so you need to cultivate it. I hold a design diary and often take notes of these cross-references and analogies.

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