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Tag: ideas

Games Like Toys

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 07/10/2026

This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.

In the last few days I’ve written about what retains value when copying a game becomes trivial and about prototypes built by mixing existing games together. Today I’m coming back to the same territory, but from the audience’s side — prompted by two pieces of content that landed in my inbox almost simultaneously.

Taking apart and putting back together

The first is a video from the AI Search channel that explains how to use AI to decompile games and remix them with each other. Mirror’s Edge parkour inside Skyrim, Minecraft inside GTA, Spider-Man in a Batman game. The parkour port, the author says, took roughly a day. His summary:

“Think of it as like copying and pasting various elements from different games to create a completely new game.”

A lot of these mashups are rough around the edges — collisions and physics breaking all over the place. Almost none of them will ever become a product. And yet loads of people watch them, recreate them, and share them.

That’s what I find fascinating. For a certain segment of the audience, the game has become a toy. The objectives we design become optional; the fun is in opening the box, pulling out the pieces, and building something nobody planned for.

What they’re really after

The second is a long post by Seth Godin on which AI businesses are actually worth building. Godin writes that at the root of almost every purchase there are three drives: status, belonging, and freedom from fear. On top of that he places an intermediate layer made up of things like control, transformation, and belonging to a narrative.

The people making mashups live exactly in that layer. They want control over the game they love, they want to transform it, and they want to show it to people like them. Every community swapping these experiments around is a network effect that nobody had to pay for.

Then there’s the line that hit me hardest as a game designer:

“Mechanics without a story is the race to the bottom.”

Godin is talking about startups. It applies to us just as well. If a mechanic can be lifted out in a day, on its own it’s worth very little. The player is looking for the story that mechanic lets them tell.

Fallout’s dog in Human: Fall Flat

I tried looking at my own game, Pawtners Case, through this lens.

Take Dogmeat, the dog from Fallout 4 — the one you order to fetch items and bring them back. Drop him into Human: Fall Flat, the physics puzzle game from No Brakes Games where Bob wanders through his own dreams grabbing everything with floppy arms. The result looks a lot like Pawtners Case: a police dog in a dreamlike city, two buttons, objects picked up with the mouth, and physics that makes you laugh.

Today I could watch that mashup running before I’d written a single line of code. It would be a private, unpublishable prototype — and it would be enough to tell whether the feel works.

There’s also a detail I now read differently. In Pawtners Case every case can be solved three ways: noob, pro, and hacker. The hacker route is designed for players who exploit the physics and the levels to reach the end in their own way — in other words, for people who treat the game like a toy. I’d designed it as a bonus feature. Maybe it’s actually speaking to the most interesting audience of all.

So, is it a business?

For the people making mashups, almost never. For whoever gives them a legal sandbox, pieces to combine, and a stage to perform on — very likely yes. Roblox, Mario Maker, and Fortnite Creative have been proving that for years.

For game designers, the question shifts: how easy is it to take my game apart, and what will players build with the pieces?

If copying a game becomes trivial, what remains of value?

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 01/10/2026

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.

I Prefer to Build

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 28/09/2026

This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.

Se lavori a lungo per la stessa azienda, c’è sempre un gruppo di persone che si lamenta molto. Del prodotto, delle scadenze, dei capi, degli altri team. La cosa che mi snerva di più è che, di solito, non si raggiunge nessun obiettivo. La lamentela occupa il posto dove potrebbe stare il lavoro.

Complaining can serve a purpose: there’s a real problem, you name it, you try to fix it. When someone vents, there are three things they might be looking for:

  1. to be heard,
  2. to be comforted,
  3. to be helped.

Listening and comforting do little to actually reduce stress, whereas offering a solution or a different way of looking at things makes a real difference. If a complaint doesn’t lead anywhere, it’s usually just noise.

The uncomfortable side of building

In games we see this all the time:

  • An unfair boss should be flagged and, if possible, fixed.
  • A hard boss kills you, makes it clear why, and lets you try again within three seconds.

Healthy frustration points you towards mastery. Complaining is like sitting on the game over screen telling everyone who walks past how terrible the boss was.

Building has an uncomfortable side too. It can become an excuse to feel superior, and some processes are genuinely broken — in those cases, calling things out is already part of the work. Between a company where things can be changed and one where nothing ever changes, you can tell them apart by how people react when someone puts forward a proposal.

Before you slag something off

My rule, in the end, is simple. If I see a problem, I propose something. If I can, I do something. If after proposing and doing I still see things aren’t working, I leave. Staying somewhere that won’t change while I complain about it is the third option, and it’s the one I want to avoid. It’s happened, but with age and kids it gets harder and harder to go down that road.

Before you slag something off — who could actually change it? If the answer isn’t the person in front of you, that conversation is probably best left alone.

From Spending Depth to Attention Depth

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 25/09/2026

This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.

The entertainment industry uses time spent as the primary measure of a product’s or service’s value.

Value = Time × (Revenue / Unit of time)

I’ve been using LLMs and machine learning for a few months now, and in my view this wave of innovation will bring three things: more supply, less pricing power, and above all an audience that compresses everything it can into less time. If that’s true, the formula above starts to crack. Time becomes the scarcest resource, and anyone trying to grow purely by stretching sessions ends up competing with everything else for the same minutes. At that point, what matters is how much each minute a player chooses to give you is actually worth.

Judged by D1 and D7

I’ve worked in mobile games for years, and my job as a designer has always been measured against Retention and Monetisation. The first obviously leads to the second: D1, D7, DAU/MAU. It makes sense — an F2P game survives on the volume of people who show up every day and, crucially, come back. The more someone returns, the more likely they are to start spending serious money. So every feature I designed had to move one of those numbers, or it got cut.

The problem is that some features do their job quietly. A system that makes it clearer what to do next, a small narrative moment that gives a session some meaning, an interface that removes friction — none of these things will shift D7 on their own in an A/B test. So they end up at the bottom of the pile, behind yet another limited-time event that does move a number, immediately. I’ve watched entire roadmaps bend towards whatever was easy to attribute, and the games that came out of that process all had the same face.

The most painful example happened to me last year. I was working with a large client and one of the best teams I’ve ever come across — creative, capable people who genuinely believed in the project. The numbers coming in were interesting, at least from where I was standing. On top of that, we essentially invented a new genre from scratch. No metric was saying the game was doing badly; it was doing well, just not as well as the parent company expected — they were chasing D1 and D7 targets that were frankly unrealistic. The pressure became so intense that, from what I heard later, the project was shelved. A real shame. The way I see it, metrics are there to tell you where not to go — and when they become the only yardstick for judging an idea, they end up killing the good ones too. That company probably had a great product on its hands, and all it would have taken was letting the people get on with it.

A medium you can’t summarise

Video games broadly — not just F2P — are in an interesting position. Think about a film or a podcast: in theory you can swap three hours of film for a two-minute recap. With a roguelike, though, it’s hard to summarise a run… the value is in actually playing it. As a business, that puts us in a privileged spot, and I think it gives us a real edge over other media.

Right now the market is in a consolidation phase, so it keeps repeating formulas it considers proven. That happens in every mature market. And on top of that, as I was saying, new technology in theory lets every person on a team produce more.

Who comes back

I think players have always looked for games that feel unique, and when everything starts to look the same, that search gets more urgent. I wouldn’t be surprised if we started measuring retention differently — looking not just at how many people come back, but which people come back. WHO returns: that’s the real question.

And to understand who comes back, you have to look at what they do when they get there. The player who spends twenty minutes fine-tuning their build, the one who reads every line of dialogue, the one who skips an easy reward because something else interests them more — each of them is telling you something about what matters to them. Optimising, collecting, discovering, making sense of what they’re doing. Build the game around those values and that player stays for years. Treat them as a data point in your D1 average and you lose them without even noticing.

Some will say the industry already looks at “who”: whales, high spenders. For years we’ve optimised for spending depth — how far into their wallet someone was willing to reach. Attention depth is a different thing: how far into the game someone is willing to go, understand it, talk about it, stick with it. The two often overlap, but when they don’t, it’s the second one that lasts longer.

Very often the passionate player — the one who spends, who brings friends along, who stays with you for years — doesn’t stand out clearly on a dashboard showing D1 retention trends. And yet that player weighs heavily on the game’s profitability.

The bet on depth

This is where I think the next shift will come, and soon. A studio that builds its strategy around attention depth might have lower DAU numbers and still win on margins. At the micro level the metric can look a bit ugly, but at the macro level the picture flips.

In practice, that means looking at different numbers: 90- or 365-day retention for your most engaged cohort rather than the D1 average, how many players reach the deeper systems, how many bring a friend, how many create something around the game. These are slower, noisier metrics — and that’s partly why nobody puts them at the top of the dashboard today.

The Business I Chose

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 16/09/2026

This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.

Yesterday I watched this interview with the CEO of Bulkhead, the studio behind Wardogs, an online multiplayer first-person shooter.

I knew the reaction would come instantly, and that this person’s words were perfect fodder for easy clicks and LinkedIn hot takes against crunch.

Today, a writer friend sends me this piece by another writer.

The business I chose

Nobody forced me into game development. My real passion is thinking about what kind of experience to bring to the medium. The part I enjoy most is discovering new cultures and finding brilliant people to talk and argue with about creative things. My dream is to put my name on a few games that actually leave a mark.

I don’t make games to get rich, and I don’t make them alone — though I had to try it on my own to figure that out. I make games because that’s the choice I made, pure love for it, if you like. Since I spend most of my waking hours at work, it matters to me to try and build something genuinely grand, rather than just tend a small, tidy little patch.

And when I work for others, I always look for projects that excite me. I don’t work just to pay the bills — I try to work on things I actually care about. And that sometimes comes at a cost: a mind that never quite switches off, extra hours, time taken away from my family.

The same was true for the family I grew up in. My mother, a paediatrician, worked far more hours than she was ever required to. My father, a lawyer, would pull all-nighters to draft briefs. My brother is a judge and he too has to do gruelling shifts with no extra pay. My family taught me that crunch doesn’t really exist as a concept — there are just things that need doing, and those things take time.

Recently I chose to move from mobile free-to-play to PC and console games, and that comes with a serious amount of extra hours. This is what I chose, and I know the consequences. We talk about our rights an awful lot, and about our responsibilities hardly at all.

The Ocarina is Immortal

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 09/09/2026

This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.

The big moment has finally arrived: my all-time favourite game has been announced as a remake.

This game belongs to a different era — one where we all looked to the future with curiosity. The opposite of today, when the future feels more like a threat. After Super Mario 64 wrote the grammar of 3D, the new Zelda arrived: an epic novel written in that same language.

The innovations were countless, from the enemy lock-on system to an inventory you could browse and use directly from the gamepad. But the most important one was that it was no longer simply a game built around the fantasy of fighting with a sword: it had become a story with a deeper meaning about childhood and growing up.

The design choice to add jumping as an action available to the player at any time does shake things up a little, and perhaps opens the door to new secrets built around ledges and elevation — something that was simply off the table before. In return, though, it adds complexity to the controls.

On that note, I wonder how this game will land with the new generations — those who never played the originals on either the N64 or the DS. I’m optimistic. On top of that, within a couple of years Nintendo will have an iron grip on the market, if Sony and Microsoft keep ignoring the needs of their core customers.

I believe in these remakes as a powerful form of cultural preservation, and I’m glad both that I get to replay this title, and that new generations will get to experience it too!

When a Game Changes the Rules While You’re Playing

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 08/09/2026

This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.

A few weeks ago I took part in a contest inside a fitness game. A acquaintance had told me about it — a friend of a friend. The prize was a trip to the Maldives for two, for whoever topped the leaderboard. To earn points you had to work out every day in front of your phone camera. Each session gave you the right to open a gacha, and the gacha decided how many points you received. With a bit of luck you could shoot straight to the top of the rankings in one go.

There were over a hundred of us. Then the problems started. The system rewarded people who brought in new sign-ups, and fake accounts started sprouting up in clusters, which the developers had to delete by hand. More than anything else, new rules began appearing — rules that hadn’t been announced at the start. One of them said something like: post a video on Instagram and you instantly get a hundred points. I’m not on Instagram. I read that and thought it was rubbish, that my goal had just moved a long way further away through no fault of my own. I quit.

The original idea behind that game wasn’t bad. You work out (which is good for you), you film yourself, you earn something. The way the contest was handled killed it within days.

The contract with players

Yesterday I was reading a piece by a video game economist. He made one simple, sound point: the way a game asks you for money is a kind of contract. You sign it when you start playing. If the other party rewrites the terms halfway through, the contract is broken — and so is the trust. My contest had a different kind of contract, about acquisition rather than monetisation. But the principle is the same.

The rest of that article, in all honesty, convinced me far less. The author described secret experiments run on millions of players, jaw-dropping figures that nobody had ever verified, a theory that supposedly explains everything. The further I read, the more it felt like the convoluted language was there to paper over the cracks in the writer’s argument. I’ll take the contract idea and leave the rest where it is.

A feeling about new models

The industry needs new ways to get noticed and get paid. The models that dominate free-to-play today — especially the 4X games coming out of Asia like Whiteout Survival — work extremely well on the numbers. The engine is social pressure: you join an alliance, others are counting on you, and to avoid letting the team down you keep spending. The problem is who’s actually footing the bill. Very often it’s people with serious dependency issues, and a model built around them isn’t something I’m proud of.

A few years back, during a rough patch at work, I got hooked on Heroes of the Storm. I used to play it with an acquaintance and we had a great time. It worked because it was skill-based: a team that was losing could turn the game around through ability, by capitalising on the other side’s mistakes. That unexpected epic win did me good, at a time when not much else was going right. In 4X games that feeling simply doesn’t exist. What counts there is time and money, and pressing the same button for weeks on end.

A healthier model is possible. In the short term it brings in less, because it deliberately lets go of the players who spend compulsively. Over the long term it’s a different story: player trust, word of mouth, the desire to come back the following year. I don’t have hard evidence for this, and I’m wary of anyone who claims they do. I have a gut feeling, and that’s a different thing.

Choose a model you can actually sustain

There’s one last piece, and it concerns those of us who make games. A sophisticated monetisation model requires people who know how to run it: balancing economies, moderating communities, keeping servers up, producing content without let-up. If those people aren’t on the team, the ambitious model won’t deliver more revenue. It’ll just deliver more ways to get things wrong.

Better to choose something simple and do it well. And to treat the people playing as someone you’ve made a pact with, not as a target to keep hitting until they give in.

Learn to Tell Your Story

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 07/09/2026

This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.

Every six months a new piece of technology comes out and people start getting excited, declaring on one hand that we’re done for, that we’ll all end up washing dishes; and on the other that we’ll never have to work again and life will be wonderful for everyone. All of it accompanied by the same case studies every time, heavily inspired by the worlds of video games and science fiction.

I don’t fall for it anymore, thank God.

There is nothing that can replace the human ability to communicate with other people. This includes:

  • playing music for other people
  • telling stories to other people
  • informing other people
  • listening to other people

Imagine for a moment that we had a programme capable of creating a complete game. Production, programming, art direction, design, quality assurance, sound design — the lot. You’d still need people who could walk into a room and make others feel something. A conductor, capable of telling compelling stories, creating memorable experiences, entertaining. No programme can do that, because the moment something like that becomes automated, it loses its novelty.

I therefore think this is the time to be more serious about things, not to give up. Your mind, your physical abilities, and the way you read a context will carry more and more weight — precisely because they are human and unique.

This is also the area I’ve invested nearly 10 years in through teaching, and the reason this blog is still going.

Have a great week — now get to work!

Is Physics Making a Comeback in Gaming?

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 25/08/2026

This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.

A few weeks ago, a LinkedIn contact proudly showed off their vinyl shelf. They mentioned they also have Spotify Premium. But the records they truly love — they want to hold them, not just stream them.

For years the narrative in entertainment has been straightforward: physical is dead, streaming and digital are the future. But recent data tells a different story.

The American vinyl market has crossed the billion-dollar mark for the first time, marking its nineteenth consecutive year of growth (RIAA, 2025 Year-End Music Industry Revenue Report). Something similar is happening in film: while standard DVDs continue to decline, 4K UHD Blu-ray sales have risen 12%, a sign that the most passionate audiences want to own their content in uncompressed quality, without depending on a platform-tied licence (Digital Entertainment Group data, as reported by FlatpanelsHD).

What about video games?

Here, platform holders are moving in the opposite direction. Disc drives sold as optional accessories, a constant push towards GaaS, ecosystems designed to go ever more digital. I understand the short-term logic: digital margins are higher, distribution costs less, player data is easier to collect. But optimising for short-term margin risks alienating the most loyal core audience — the very same people who, in music and film, are today driving the physical revival.

It’s true that in volume, digital still leads aggregate sales, especially when you lump together mass-market multiplayer titles and premium single-player experiences. But high-end single-player games are emotional investments. Players don’t just consume them — they collect them. I know people who keep the cases of the games that shaped them on their living room shelf, just like my friend keeps his records on his.

On that note, have a listen to this gorgeous Ukrainian lullaby from the new Stalker 2: Cost of Hope DLC:

Why digital is still winning, for now

Geopolitical pressures on supply chains and component costs currently give digital distribution a real cost advantage, and that’s the main reason platform holders are pushing in that direction. But when supply chains stabilise and fatigue around digital licensing — that feeling of “you don’t actually own what you buy” — keeps growing, I think physical will find its moment of revival in gaming too, perhaps on a smaller scale than before, but still meaningful.

Chasing digital uniformity to chase a trend risks losing sight of a simple principle that vinyl and Blu-ray have been quietly proving for years: premium content creates premium collectors.

My gut feeling is that platform holders are abandoning their most loyal fans too soon, all to run after a passing industry trend.

Design and Marketing: A Common Language

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 24/08/2026

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!

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