As I am reading about another studio closure (I am sorry for the colleagues at SUPERVIVE), I am thinking on the distribution problem we have right now. I believe than on one hand you have to create a truly unique experience to have chances in this environment. Easier said than done, of course, because it’s a matter of taste and also realism. I worked on many derivative projects, and the leaders were absolutely sure of their uniqueness.
You need to put the right glasses on, and be extremely aware of your game unique selling points. A way to do that is by making business: if you’re not able to sell your game to publishers, if you don’t engage with players or other entities, you are on a dangerous track. We tend to look inside too much, when we should look outside and check if Players really have the same perception as us on the product. In this case, Players are also potential business partners.
I believe that videogames have still lots of margin for improvement, so we should stop repeating old formulas over and over and we should try to make a step forward.
Marketing works better if the marketer believes in the product. Game design can help with this, if the company allows the communication between designers and marketers.
Sometimes, though, we are working on a game we don’t really believe in. We are there just for the job, someone above makes all the calls and we do not see any value behind the strategy. It happens, more than it should actually.
Everything gets more complicated from there, so one of our duties in this case is to find common ground and push to focus the efforts on that. Because only that may become unique, in the end.
I am using LinkedIn less for posting, and I am just leaving comments here and there. I met a couple of haters (it’s completely normal when you have ideas to share and you reach some reader more), and I decided to post less. Also, the social network is suffering the classic “enshittification” typical for this kind of platforms where you are the product and the angry product invests more.
Another policy I activated is this one: only answer to critics if they are also admirers. There are people who only comment to criticize, those are the worse. It’s better to ignore them or, in some cases, block them all together.
Performance marketing for mobile games has become lately a synonym for scam. There is not other world to describe the act of copying others’ creatives and produce massive quantity of low quality, repetitive content to try to catch the attention of people.
Marketing expert Matej Lancaric is happy to show off every week the disaster that mobile marketing as become
The good news is that marketing cannot be like that.
Marketing is the generous act of showing up with a true story that helps people get to where they’d like to go.
Seth Godin
Game design can seriously help to find the true story to tell to the people. The issue stands in the business model of free-to-play, of course. In a model where 5% (at best) of people pays something, and that something is variable and potentially very high, you need a massive volume of installs.
But maybe mobile gaming could be different and not just free-to-play. The point is to convince founders and CEOs to believe in this.
If you are making levels professionally, you cannot just jump in the engine and placing shapes and mechanics here and there. You need a way of plan and communicate your design choices ahead. The big picture of the level and how it fits into the overall scheme of things is very much needed.
That’s why we use beat charts, a spreadsheet that puts everything in perspective. In my case, I have these fields:
Level ID: Unique name for the level, it should also correspond to the actual scene or map name inside of the engine.
Layout: a screenshot (or a link to a screenshot) of the level so that you and your teammates can directly recognize them when you have dozens levels.
Skill atom: the original unique thing the Player should learn or confirm during this level
Twist: if there is a special twist, describe it here. This can be filled later and just planned with a true/false text
List of mechanics: each column a single mechanic and a true/false if that mechanic is present inside of a level. Put the columns in order of appearance
Difficulty: the % of players who will not pass the level or die at least once.
Narrative: a short brief of what you are conveying to the Players (it can be a story, but also specific emotions)
Mood: useful to suggest your mood to environment art or in general artists. Try to put a mood board for them to understand. You can reuse the same mood boards over and over, of course. In this way you will also predict the weight of your design choices.
Music: similar to mood but put your musical references focusing on the feeling the Player should experiment during the level.
Many confuse casual games with simple games. Casual games permit the satisfaction of instinctual needs in small (2–5 minute) play sessions. However, many hardcore players of these casual games can play them for hours. In fact, they are the players who actually maintain the business.
I’ve worked on a bunch of them, and I feel like a clockmaker. They may feel simple, but they are deep: you move one gear and you must check all the others connected to it. You need patience to achieve the sweet spot (the perfect balance).
To properly study your competitors, you need to analyze them in immense detail. You may even need to record a session and review it frame-by-frame to fully understand the game’s circuit and how it works.
I insist a lot on the importance of entertainment when we design new games. I spoke on this blog regarding the satisfaction of core instincts, and I am aware that someone would need something more actionable and practical. The easy resource is KPIs, which often are seeing like targets to hit. They aren’t in my opinion: they are diagnostic tools for spotting flaws in your gameplay, indicators.
For every feature, we first define the specific utility it provides, and then we measure its impact on player behavior.
Player Instinct
The Utility Provided
Impact (examples)
Acquisition (Urge to collect)
Giving the player interesting things to collect that drive progression.
Completion Rate (Quests, levels, and the final game).
Social Connection (Gregariousness)
Maintaining engagement and fostering community.
Stickiness and high D7 Retention. Track the specific flows to connect with others and also the number of social interactions.
Assertiveness & Mastery
The feeling of power and competence within a core system.
Win Rate and Feature Usage.
Curiosity
Satisfying the urge to discover new things.
High Session Length. Qualitatively, the best sign is playtesters who genuinely want more at the end of a prototype. Check also heuristics after a playtest
Prototypes are essential, especially when playtested and attached to heuristics. By leading with the projected impact on player behavior, we demonstrate business value. This is how we continue the pursuit of l’avenir, the radical, unexpected break from the past.
Seth Godin delivered an interesting message this week: there is often no correlation between effort and value.
We, in the games industry, romanticize the “crunch” and value the difficulty of creation: “This game took us five years eating pizza; therefore, it is valuable.”. This happens especially in the indie space, I have to say.
But as Godin argues, software isn’t worth more just because it was hand-coded. The player doesn’t pay for the eight years of blood, sweat, and tears; they pay for something entertaining.
Selling Effort, Not Entertainment
Game developers often sell their effort (months spent developing, solving a massive technical debt, or writing a thousand pages of lore) rather than their utility (the value the player extracts).
A game’s success is not determined by its complexity or its budget. It is determined by how efficiently and deeply it connects with people making them let discover new things. You are selling flow, mastery, social connection (Gregariousness), or the thrill of acquisition. More in general, instincts fulfillment.
That’s why a three-week prototype that perfectly fulfills the instinct of Acquisition with a simple, addictive loop will generate more value than a five-year AAA project with complex mechanics that confuse or exhaust the player. The player will pay more for the thing that is useful (solves their boredom, satisfies their urge to collect) than the thing that was difficult to make.
The Value Equation: Effort vs. Impact
The moment you shift your focus from effort to impact, your design choices become ruthlessly efficient.
The Wrong Metric (Effort)
The Right Metric (Value/Utility)
“We spent 3 months developing this tool.”
“This tool reduced iteration time by 50%.”
“This feature required 10 artists and a custom rendering pipeline.”
“This feature drove 30% higher D7 Retention because it amplified the core [Instinct].”
“The lore is 500 pages thick and highly integrated.”
“The player’s curiosity is satisfied in the first 5 minutes of play, leading to high Session Length.”
Stop selling the struggle. Start focusing on what matters.
Focus on Utility
To apply the Godin Principle to your work, make this shift today:
Define the Utility: For every feature you build, ask, “What is the specific utility this gives the player?” (e.g., “The utility of this new combat loop is the feeling of Assertiveness and mastery, which we will measure via win rate and feature usage.”)
Scope, scope, scope: Ruthlessly eliminate any work that increases effort but does not commensurately increase utility.
Charge for the Use, Not the Cost: When presenting your work to publishers or stakeholders, never lead with the cost of creation. Lead with the projected impact on player behavior (according to the cultural moments and trends, connecting with the instincts) and business health (Metric Improvement).
I’ve been working in a high performance environment for many years now. I’m amazed about the output of our small team (6 FTE+1 Free Lancer). To give you an example, we’re currently working on a casual puzzle game with a huge focus on narrative and world building. We’re approaching our 2 week release cadence which includes six to seven new fully animated story chapters and 90+ new levels, while releasing big new features every 4 weeks, with small and big tweaks, SDK updates, data gathering and general improvements, bug fixes and localization in many languages, while making sure we keep analyzing incoming data.
The casual puzzle space in which we’re operating is very competitive with thousands of entries a year with only a handful being able to succeed and enter the top 100. To get there, large teams (50-500 members) and large investments (1M-5M) are our competitors. And even in those teams, pressure to succeed is high and nothing but top performance is expected.
I’ve been thinking how we as a team make sure we are coping with this pressure. I believe we each individually have found a way to cope and collectively as a team found a way to facilitate and support each other. A large contributing factor for our small team is working from home. Not only does it cut out commute every day, saving a lot of time for each member. Working from home also afforded the environment where flexibility can occur. This flexibility in terms of working hours for instance is where some of our team members thrive.
We roughly work between 9-5 with strict attention rules around meetings. At least half of our team enjoys the ability to work during the quiet evenings, or pursuit a particular thought in the night. Others are able to schedule kids pick-up or going to the gym. And all of us enjoy the ability to let life happen and attend any important activity during working hours. Our team treats work as the second most important thing, next to our life outside of work. We cover for each other when someone is ill or experiences life changing events, we plan our schedules and priorities around vacations and time off, we accommodate members traveling the world and working from different time zone and generally we all help each other make it work.
But I think all of this would not be possible without a shared goal, without a shared ambition, without our internal drive to want to succeed. This focus enables us to do all of the above and I’m sure will drive us towards success.
Performance Marketing expert Matej Lancaric issued a strong “WAKE UP call” to Supercell, critiquing their slow pace, their seemingly “random” new projects (like the “BOAT game”), and their failure to launch a hit in years.
Matej’s point: Why isn’t Supercell making a strategy game? Look at Century Games and Rivergame—they are launching hits, leveraging years of development and templatization.
Matej and his colleague Jakub Remiar are fundamentally right about the market reality: Supercell is competing in the same giant mass market as these Chinese juggernauts. However, the strategy Supercell needs to adopt is a matter of competitive advantage, not market segment.
Competing on the Wrong Metric
Jakub points out that the Chinese giants are masters of scaling and aggressive UA. They specialize in perfecting proven formulas, backed by efficient labor and rapid execution.
The mistake for Supercell would be to adopt this same strategy. Why? Because on the field of quantity, templatization, and low-cost labor, it is a lost battle; a race to the bottom that Supercell cannot win without sacrificing its corporate culture and cost structure.
Quality as Novelty
The argument that “quality will save them” is often seen as a defense mechanism, but quality here does not mean polish on a clone. Quality, in the Supercell context, may mean novelty and emergent gameplay.
Supercell’s strength has always been finding new formulas within a strong social/multiplayer framework. If they discover the right key, a system that generates unpredictable, repeatable fun, they create a lasting intellectual property that is inherently difficult to copy. This is true innovation, and it’s their only path to sustainable, high-margin success.
They must either focus on their core IPs (more Clash Royale and Clash of Clans) or they must find a way to put out content faster while still prioritizing the discovery and novelty that defines their brand.
Choose Your Competitive Strategy
The great divide in mass-market mobile design is no longer just between Indie and AAA; it’s between The Template Master and The Emergence Hunter.
If You Choose Templatization (The Century Games Path): Your primary focus must be UA efficiency and Monetization Optimization. Rigorously deconstruct the core loop of existing hits (Last War) and focus your design energy on maximizing retention and revenue curves within that proven framework.
If You Choose Emergence: Focus 90% of your time on building a ruleset that generates an unexpected and delightful player experience. If you can’t discover the fun cheaply, put the project on pause.
Know Your Runway: Innovation is expensive; execution is faster. Your choice of strategy must align with your budget reality.
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