This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
There’s a saying from Cilento (a region in southern Italy) that goes: “when strength fades, arrogance grows.”
I took part in a meeting about the creative vision for a project, and I put forward some “unique selling points” — elements that could make it stand out. I flagged the ones that, to me, were already floating around in the air, and suggested a few more. That was my way of opening up the discussion with the team. My role wasn’t a managerial one, but I needed to get a conversation going and hear what my directors had to say, to get a better feel for the project.
My proposal was shot down before it even got off the ground: a colleague — a designer — told me that “unique selling point” is a marketing term and has no place in game design. Everyone else in the room backed him up, and the discussion died right there. It felt like a classic case of pointing at the moon and someone staring at your finger: I’m trying to show something — which might be interesting or might not — and instead people take issue with the act of showing itself. This is what happens when you’ve been doing the same thing for years and start believing you’ve already figured it all out. But in the world of video games, where everything depends on so many human and contextual factors, nobody ever truly knows anything, deep down.
Beyond the frustration of the moment — and perhaps I wasn’t great at anticipating how that might land — what bothers me more is seeing how many designers fail to recognise the value game design brings to the business. Treating marketing as something lesser, something disconnected from the real work, a mere sales tool and nothing more — that’s just ignorance, as far as I’m concerned. Especially in 2026, when technology lets us cover more ground than ever before, there are elements of marketing that absolutely need to be folded into game design.
Reducing marketing to the act of selling alone is a pretty basic mistake. Marketing takes time — it’s about building relationships and trust. Game design can’t afford to detach itself from that process. Plenty of modern studios, before they’ve even released a single demo, are already setting up Discord servers. Building community, they call it (even if what’s being built isn’t really a community in the true sense — but that’s a separate conversation). Game designers are active in these spaces, engaging with people to understand how to improve their game. That is marketing, when all’s said and done.
When we talk about “unique selling points,” yes, the concept of selling is right there in the phrase — but the phrasing itself implies an intention rather than an immediate action. Getting to that sale means passing through stages where game design is absolutely critical. Thinking about why a player, three to seven years from now, should buy our game — rather than just doing whatever feels right in the moment — is maturity. It’s professionalism. It’s craft.
Have a great week, everyone!