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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
Yesterday I went out for dinner with my family at a restaurant. I asked for details about a dish, the waitress gave them to me, I ordered it. When it arrived, several of the things she’d described were missing. I pointed it out, she went to speak to the chef, who sent back the message: “that’s how the dish comes.”
I’m unlikely to go back. And for a moment I thought about leaving a negative review on Google Maps. I went to look the place up, read through the existing reviews, and found plenty of positive ones and just as many negative — the negative ones almost always about the exact same thing as my experience.
Adding mine would have just been noise on top of noise. And when you think about it, what we’re really doing when we leave a review like that is feeding a platform and potentially damaging someone who, that evening, had simply made a mistake. I let it go. If someone asks me to recommend a restaurant in future, I just won’t mention that one.
What struck me, thinking it over afterwards, was why that dish had bothered me so much. It wasn’t just the missing elements. It was that the explanation I got — “that’s how it comes” — left me with no sense of control: I couldn’t understand what had happened, I couldn’t avoid it next time, the blame sat entirely outside me and was presented as a fixed house rule. If the chef had said “you’re right, we missed that, let me redo it,” I’d probably have left happy anyway. It’s the same mechanism that makes a player get angry — not so much at losing, but at not understanding why they lost and not knowing what to change next time. Negative reviews, whether for restaurants or games, more often come from that kind of frustration than from the difficulty itself.
And players leave reviews on platforms far more often than a customer leaves a review for a local restaurant. That review, on Steam, has a direct impact on a game’s sales. It’s why platforms in my industry have overtaken even personal recommendations: your opinion, if you write it there, carries real weight (unlike with neighbourhood restaurants, thank goodness).
How do you survive in this kind of situation?
I was watching an interview with a designer who says he doesn’t play other games during development, so as not to be influenced. The interviewer points out that Shigeru Miyamoto has said similar things on several occasions — arriving at his own solutions rather than retracing what already exists.
I work in exactly the opposite way, probably because I don’t make my own games but work for third parties (clients and GSC Game World, at the time of writing). When I start a new design I always look for the unique and distinctive elements by starting from what the competition is already doing. Pareto’s rule applies: 80% familiar territory, 20% novelty. To put it into practice I use a few platforms:
I use Gemini and Claude for research
I use Steam to study competitors’ capsules and descriptions, and to read reviews
I use YouTube as a kind of quick playtesting proxy
A concrete example: if I’m working on a progression system, I’ll first go to Steam and read what players love or hate about similar systems that are already out there (that’s my 80% — what the audience already expects and recognises). Then I look at where all the competitors start to look too much alike, because that’s where there’s room for the 20% of novelty that makes a game stand out without scaring off the people who try it.
It also depends on the kind of work I do: I can’t play the “misunderstood genius” when I’m working for a client — I need to meet their requirements as professionally as possible. But I don’t experience that as a creative compromise. Looking first at what already exists and figuring out what I can adapt, recombine or recalibrate is a genuine working method, not an imposed constraint: more often than not, the smartest move isn’t to invent from scratch, but to find the right lever in what already works.
Platforms, in this sense, help me enormously — speeding up tasks and bringing solid data to help me align with the client. The very same platforms that now dominate the games industry are the ones that provide the most valuable tools for improving what I do. On the other side, though, the most skilled creators use them differently, and go out of their way not to let them have a hold over the creative process when it really matters.
Maybe the answer isn’t to pick one approach over the other, but to know when to use each. Platforms as a research tool when I’m working for someone else and need to understand what the market expects. Silence when I’m working on something of my own and want it to come from an idea, not from a comparison. And in both cases, the lesson from the restaurant stays the same: whether you’re reading reviews or designing a system that will generate them, the right question isn’t “how harsh is the verdict” — it’s “does the player understand why it happened, and do they feel like they can do something about it next time.”
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
I had a colleague a while back who seemed genuinely brilliant. They had made some specific lifestyle choices, and before they joined, a few people in the work chat had made the odd joke at those choices’ expense. Nothing malicious — just the usual banter.
When they joined the company, this person went through Slack looking at old messages to see if anyone had previously taken a dig at their lifestyle. They found the messages, and managed to work with HR to get the people who’d been laughing fired.
Years later, this person was let go themselves, and since then they’ve been constantly in the middle of some controversy or other. I’m not saying they’re wrong — in principle, they have a point. But I have to say things start to smell a bit off when either you keep getting sacked or there’s always a problem with the CEO or senior leadership.
I won’t set myself up as anyone’s moral compass here — my own tolerance for certain things is genuinely low, and I work hard to train it. For me, professionalism comes before everything else. If your colleagues make jokes that offend you, stop and think about what happens to them if they lose their jobs over it. Professionalism also means being patient when the situation calls for it.
If your company lets you go for any reason — say, because it would rather replace you with AI — the professional thing to do, in my view, is to accept it and move on to the next thing. Turning into a keyboard warrior and leaking company strategies that are covered by an NDA is not professional. I know it’s infuriating, I know it hurts, but professionalism, I’ll say it again, comes first.
If one of your employees calls something out publicly, professionalism requires that you go to your comms department and craft a proper response — not react from the gut, and certainly not without getting some advice first, ideally not from Claude.
The lack of professionalism I see in this industry is staggering. We all need more patience and more professionalism — every single one of us. Have a good weekend.
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
La crisi che stiamo vivendo nel settore dei videogiochi deriva principalmente dal fatto che il potere si è spostato dai publisher alle piattaforme. Una delle piattaforme contemporanee più rilevanti è Roblox.
Anche se il suo modello di business è discutibile, il 50% dei bambini americani apre Roblox nel corso della settimana. La piattaforma è estremamente accessibile e presente su molteplici dispositivi. Il che mi riporta, a mio avviso, a un momento simile all’inizio degli anni ’90, quando la gente iniziava a chiedersi cosa fosse davvero un videogioco — il momento in cui nacquero Baldur’s Gate e titoli simili, per capirci.
Lo dico sempre ai miei colleghi e clienti: se il tuo gioco esce tra sette anni, il pubblico a cui ti rivolgi in questo momento sta probabilmente giocando su Roblox, Minecraft e Fortnite. Fare previsioni è impossibile, perché i videogiochi toccano corde molto personali e le tendenze vanno e vengono. Un gioco in stile anni ’90 potrebbe tornare di moda nel 2030 — non lo sappiamo.
Eppure noto una tendenza a voler ignorare queste mode, in gran parte perché non corrispondono a quella che consideriamo la nostra idea di come dovrebbe essere un videogioco. Siamo cresciuti con certi valori, quei valori vengono oggi messi seriamente in discussione, e questo porta inevitabilmente a degli attriti. È del tutto umano cercare di evitarli con qualche scusa, perché fare i conti con ostacoli reali fa anche male.
Quindi, per quanto sia vero che Roblox ha permesso la diffusione di un gioco in cui era possibile pagare per derubare bambini dei loro personaggi virtuali e umiliarli, è altrettanto vero che moltissime persone scelgono quella come forma di intrattenimento. La formula del successo, secondo me, sta nel trovare il modo di far convivere i nostri ideali con queste nuove tendenze.
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
In 2022 I decided to try switching careers, from mobile to PC/console games. You know the ones — in crisis, not growing, running on increasingly expensive hardware, built by hundreds of well-paid people over seven years on unsustainable business models? Yeah, those. Well, not exactly those — I’m being ironic… but you get the idea.
I actually managed it this year. In March I joined the ranks of GSC Game World, the creators of the legendary S.T.A.L.K.E.R., thanks to a recommendation. “We need people like you,” my friend Adrian told me in August 2025, and seven months later I was in. After years of a career in mobile and now moving to PC and console games, I’m realising just how much I still have to learn about game design. The shift in mindset is sharp.
Mobile and premium
In mobile, speed and execution efficiency are everything, because the business runs fundamentally on performance marketing. Companies pay to acquire users (when a game is free, your time becomes the currency), so the whole game is about retaining them and nudging them towards small payments to keep them hooked.
Premium titles are a completely different story:
First of all, there’s a direction to discover — somehow — together with your team. It’s about creating a memorable experience, built on a fantasy that taps into something players genuinely desire. You can’t run quick experiments the way you do in mobile; instead, you have to think carefully through all the possibilities a feature opens up.
Games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. already have their audience, a good chunk of whom are very vocal online. The ability to listen to all those voices and turn feedback into concrete design decisions becomes essential. In mobile, it’s more about making changes and watching behavioural data, since the players who spend the most and keep the business afloat — the so-called whales — tend to be pretty quiet.
Everyone has their passion, their ego, and their experience, so working on premium game design means finding the meeting point between personal creative vision, business sustainability, and technical feasibility with the developers. A decision made today could have ripple effects five to seven months down the line. Very different from mobile, where you can iterate much faster and where personal creative vision only goes so far (see: dark patterns that nobody actually likes, but that we all end up using anyway because there’s no real alternative).
Technology and AI
Lately a lot of players have been emerging promising to speed up content production, and the most popular technology is obviously artificial intelligence. However, the critical judgement, vision, and systemic sensitivity needed to build this kind of product make these tools less useful than you’d think. You need to think very strategically, and you also need leadership skills to navigate the different habits and personalities within a team. No algorithm helps you with that. You’re far better off picking up a hobby, exercising, reading history and philosophy to understand what makes people tick.
I’m happy, and that’s what matters. My little business isn’t in crisis, I’m also building an indie game, and I’m in a very creative phase of my life. Most importantly, I’m getting my hands on things that are real — things that actually matter.
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