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The Taste of Results

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 06/08/2026

When we design a new game, we enter a battle between personal taste and results. The taste of whoever truly owns the vision is what shapes even the reading of those results. In my career I’ve never seen a 100% scientific team. I have, however, seen a 100% artistic team — meaning a team focused solely on results.

Results as objectives

One of the most common problems in contemporary game development is using KPIs as objectives. This immediately drains them of meaning — the team fixates on hitting the number and loses sight of the bigger picture. And obviously, that harms not just the artistic side, but the scientific one too.

KPIs are useful for understanding two things:

Whether the direction we’re heading in is the wrong one (but they won’t tell us if it’s the right one)
Whether the changes we’re making to the product are moving things in the right direction (but they won’t tell us if the idea itself is any good)

To find genuinely good, winning ideas, we need to make room for creativity and our artistic side.

Taste as an excuse

The problem I see most often on the other side is using the artistic dimension as an excuse to stop thinking about the player’s final experience, and focus only on our own personal challenge of making content. A game is indeed a work of art, but it’s sold in a fiercely competitive market, in a world where attention spans are razor thin. The only way to survive long-term is to create play experiences that are genuinely worth people’s time. And taste alone isn’t enough for that.

It matters to think about the fantasy we’re offering players — what players can become through our game. To structure that thinking properly, and channel our personal taste in service of it. When we’re working with a team, things get considerably more complicated, because as designers we have to constantly worry about aligning, influencing, and communicating. And that’s not always an easy job, especially with more artistically-minded teams. You have to be honest and make yourself vulnerable, even at the risk of being undermined by colleagues. It’s not a role that suits everyone.

Art, Craft, and Science

For me, the best approach is always to start from something intimate and personal (again, tricky when working in a team), because games are an art form and players want to live through experiences that are aesthetically rich. Aesthetic here meaning the essence of the experience, not just the visual layer. So the base of the pyramid is the artistic one.

Then there’s the second side, which is the engineering and technical side. Depending on what you want to realise on screen, you’ll need specific resources — and if the final quality is low, it drags everything else down with it.

The scientific side helps you understand where not to go, and how you’re currently tracking, but it generally doesn’t offer a diagnosis. For that, you have to go back to the art. If I picture all of this schematically, it’s like a pyramid with a strong base (art), something that coils around itself and can complicate things (craft/technology), and a final point that doesn’t carry too much weight in the end, but is still essential to complete the shape (science). I tried asking Gemini to visualise this concept and it generated this image:

Rolled triangle

A Few Techniques for Better Navigation

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 05/08/2026

I’ve been working for a few months now with a new team in a part of the industry that’s completely new to me. I keep thinking back to a post I read a while ago by Owen Mahoney about the 4 industries of video games. My hands-on experience is confirming that the different worlds Mahoney identifies really are different.

Communication is genuinely different

In mobile f2p, as a designer I always have to justify everything with KPIs and metrics — that’s just the deal. In the PC/Console world, though, that kind of thing is generally frowned upon. These are games far more grounded in the creators’ personal taste, which brings another consequence with it: to avoid too much noise and keep the development process from getting muddy, people very often don’t communicate properly. You work in isolation, and you have to trust your teammates completely.

My previous professional experience pushed me to look for solutions to this problem, but I was stopped almost at the first attempt. I took it pretty badly at first — I’ll admit I felt almost useless in that context. But then something shifted: as a designer I don’t have to justify every single thing with numbers, and that is genuinely an improvement.

So all I’m left with is complete trust in my fellow travellers — but one fundamental problem remains: the feeling of being lost. Sharing is limited, documentation is all over the place, and it’s easy to feel disconnected from the bigger picture.

How I’m tackling this challenge

My years of experience, even if not directly in high-end games, are still there, and I’m adopting some techniques to get my bearings. Fair warning: they’re not for everyone — not everyone can make themselves vulnerable and risk coming across as the person who doesn’t know what they’re doing. But for me, the goal (my personal and professional growth, and my connection with the team) outweighs any bruised ego.

The first technique, which I call probing, is to keep putting proposals to the team. I structure them properly, make the best case I can, and table them in a meeting with everyone present. The typical response is that it can’t be done that way, that it’s always been done differently, that the game is not what I’m imagining. And that’s exactly what I’m after: the designers who know the product better than I do finally start sharing what they know. Sometimes they even argue amongst themselves — I just sit there and listen, taking it all in.

The second technique I use is reverse-engineering assets and commits. Following comments and discussions in the code helps me really understand what everyone is actually trying to achieve.

The third technique is mapping the team’s knowledge holders. Domain experts, and sometimes short one-to-one chats to concretely understand how something works. The trick there is to go in with an idea already formed, then ask for confirmation. Something interesting always comes out of it.

Finally, the last thing I spend time on is being a bit of a documentation archaeologist. The information is fragmented and often contradictory, but it’s still something. My goal is always to track down documentation written for external partners, because that’s usually where you’ll find the clearest articulation of the vision.

Change isn’t easy, but it makes you richer

Sometimes I have to sit with feelings of helplessness and incompetence — but for me, that’s exactly where the real personal, spiritual, and professional growth lives. I hope this post can be useful to anyone who finds themselves in the same situation, or something like it.

It’s also really important to make yourself useful: pick up simple tasks that nobody wants to do, so the team understands you’re there to help, not to act as a consultant. There’s a bias against people who come from mobile, like me — no point pretending otherwise. The only way I know to push back against it is to roll your sleeves up and get on with it.

Serve, Don’t Manipulate

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 03/08/2026

Andrew Kelley, the creator of the Zig programming language, opened a talk with an uncomfortable question: who does the software we write actually serve? The talk is called “Don’t Take the Black Pill” and it was made for an audience of developers, not game designers. But it’s exactly the question we should be asking ourselves every time we design a progression system.

A more honest measure than “fun”

Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory says that a person is doing well — in a game as in life — when three needs are being met: autonomy (my choices matter), competence (I’m improving, and I can see it), and relatedness (I’m not alone). A system can have spotless retention metrics and still deny all three. There’s a name for that too: coercive retention. The progression is there, but the player comes back because a timer is expiring or a notification dragged them back in, not because they actually wanted to.

Coercionware, outside games too

Kelley calls this category “coercionware”: software whose purpose isn’t to serve the people using it, but to manipulate them. The examples he gives don’t come from games — unsolicited push notifications, A/B tests optimising for the click rather than the experience, recommendation algorithms chasing engagement instead of value. What struck me is that he frames all of this as a design choice, not a side effect. Someone, in a meeting, decided this was fine.

The same problem, different name

In games we call it other things: gacha, limited-time events, season passes that pile on the pressure. But it’s the same mechanism: autonomy is taken away to guarantee a return. I wrote about this last week when talking about dopamine and oxytocin — the relatedness in Self-Determination Theory is, at the end of the day, the same conversation as oxytocin. A player who comes back to spend time in a world or with other people doesn’t need to be held in place by a timer.

A useful habit

There’s a simple habit I use when evaluating a new feature: play devil’s advocate with myself. Assume it fails, and ask why. The list of reasons usually includes things like “it confuses the player” or “it doesn’t convert well enough.” It’s worth adding one more: it fails because it manipulates instead of serves. That question doesn’t come up on its own in a roadmap meeting. You have to ask it deliberately, before you ship.

The next time a feature improves the numbers, the right question isn’t whether it works. It’s whether the player chose it — or got caught in it.

Building Worlds at the Right Pace

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 31/07/2026

Sensor Tower has published its State of Mobile 2026.

Mobile game downloads have fallen for the second year running: -7.2% in 2025, down to 50.41 billion. In Q1 2026 the decline accelerates — -12% year on year, 11.9 billion downloads — the worst first quarter since 2019. Monetisation, on the other hand, is holding up: in-app spending grew 1.3% in 2025, but has been flat for five consecutive quarters, up just 0.5% in Q1 2026 compared to the previous year.

Fewer and fewer people are downloading mobile games, and the ones who stick around aren’t spending more. The industry is squeezing a user base that isn’t growing, wringing a bit more value out of each download.

The disaster didn’t start yesterday

Part of this story is well known. A few years ago Apple killed off IDFA, the identifier that allowed user tracking across apps for advertising purposes. From that point, user acquisition costs exploded, because targeting effectively became much harder. Many mobile studios had built their whole model around that mechanism. When it broke, so did their ability to grow cheaply.

But that only explains half the problem. Acquisition costs explain why it’s become more expensive to find new players. They don’t explain why spending from players already inside a game has been flat for a year and a half. Plenty of people conclude that “players prefer old games, they don’t want anything new.” That explanation has always struck me as a bit of a convenient excuse.

When the brain stops responding

Most of these games are built almost entirely on dopamine. Variable-ratio rewards, progression loops, notifications, artificial urgency, FOMO. It works brilliantly at first. The problem is that the dopaminergic system adapts. You need an ever-larger stimulus to get the same response, and at some point the stimulus just isn’t enough any more.

Ramin Shokrizade puts it well in an article that addresses exactly this point: an arms race built purely on dopamine, in an attention economy that’s already saturated, can only end badly for anyone who’s staked their entire business model on it. His alternative proposal is to design for oxytocin rather than dopamine — social bonds, cooperation, interdependence between players instead of ever-faster solitary rewards. He cites the player-driven economy of early EVE Online as an example (with the caveat that that history has been somewhat mythologised over time), and notes that the wave of “cosy” games in recent years is essentially a cultural response to the same underlying need: people who want to be kind to other people, inside a world that feels like their own. That’s also why 4X games have been performing better than most lately.

I think Sensor Tower’s numbers are partly this: the dopamine bill coming due. It’s not (only) an acquisition problem. It’s an industry that optimised for short-term stimulus rather than long-term attachment, and now the average player is desensitised.

Speed as a symptom, not a feature

There’s another signal, in a different niche but rooted in the same problem. David Brevik, creator of Diablo, spoke recently about how fast modern ARPGs have become. Screens full of enemies dying by the hundred, instant progression, nothing that feels personal or earned. His defence of Diablo 2, the game that helped define the genre: the pace was slow on purpose, and that’s precisely why it held up for twenty years. I still play it today! By compressing that journey and making it feel almost trivial, the whole experience has been cheapened.

Building worlds instead of chasing the spike

If this reading is right, the way out isn’t an even more optimised loop. It’s the opposite: games that bet on a world worth inhabiting, relationships between players, a sense of place that’s worth coming back to again and again even without a new reward every three minutes.

That’s exactly the territory I work on every day at GSC Game World, the studio behind STALKER. On 20 August, the first major DLC drops:

The trailer says it better than I can: not a new reward loop, but another piece of the Zone to move through, with all its silence, its danger, and its deliberate slowness.

It’s no coincidence that a studio doing this for nearly twenty years is still here, while mobile chases a dopamine spike that’s stopped working.

How I Try to Use AI

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 28/07/2026

When there’s a new design problem, my first move can be to open Claude and ask it to structure things for me. Sometimes that happens out of laziness, sometimes out of a genuine fear of getting it wrong.

This week I read two articles:

The first, on the Atlantic, argues that when “intelligence” becomes abundant, what actually makes the difference is volition. The winners aren’t those who use AI to do less work — they’re the ones who use it to push themselves harder, to demand more of themselves in the process.

The second, by Lars Faye, argues that AI coding tools remove exactly the friction that builds real expertise. The paradox is that you need expertise to use these tools well, but using the tools can prevent that expertise from forming in the first place.

The HOW matters

For years I’ve written the first draft of a design pillar or a one-pager by hand, before I even open an editor. That’s the effort I need — the thing that makes me truly understand what I’m actually proposing.

If an algorithm decides how a problem is framed, we end up as mere executors, and we lose the part that’s supposed to make us grow as designers. Claude and other platforms bring the difficulty of framing down to nearly zero, but that’s precisely the bit that should stay ours. Identifying a problem is slow work by its very nature — that’s where judgement gets trained.

So the rule I set for myself is a simple one: I sketch out the framing on my own first, even if it’s rough, even if it’s wrong. Then I bring it to Claude to sharpen.

AI isn’t just a tool — I’ve written about this before. The real risk is losing sight of when you’re using it to dodge the kind of struggle that actually matters.

Studying the past to design the future

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 27/07/2026

I read two interesting articles this week: the first is by Rob Fahey on GamesIndustry.biz.

The title says it all: five years of rolling layoffs have taken a serious toll on talent and experience. Contractors, often left out of the official numbers, have probably taken two or three times the hit compared to permanent staff. People who leave often don’t come back, especially if they have a family. Fahey proposes a model closer to the indie world, where small teams prototype on limited budgets and publishers decide what to take into full production, separating the creative-risk phase from the execution phase.

The second article is an interview with Miyamoto for Famitsu. He says something that complements this perfectly: “if you try to base things on what seems to have broad appeal, you end up with something generic.” Nintendo starts by asking why people play in the first place. The great classics didn’t come from market research, for instance:

Pokémon grew out of Satoshi Tajiri’s passion for collecting insects
Splatoon came from the physical pleasure of painting over territory
Mario works because movement itself is fun.

What the history of video games teaches us

When an industry is under economic pressure, as it is today, the instinctive reaction is to reduce risk everywhere — including creative choices. But a “safe” idea is often also an invisible one: it holds together on paper and is forgotten the next day. Financial caution and creative caution are two different axes, and conflating them is the fastest way to end up making uninteresting games, at exactly the moment when you can least afford to.

Players don’t get attached to mechanics in the abstract — they get attached to what those mechanics let them be. Global appeal is almost always a side effect of genuine interest.

The solution runs through game design too

A design pillar that can’t say no to anything isn’t doing any real work: when the pressure is on, it’s the vague pillars — the ones that look good on a slide but have no practical consequences — that are the first to go.

I think Fahey’s article and the Miyamoto piece together are really saying one thing: the way to navigate an unstable industry is to get clearer about what you’re actually trying to make players feel. Everything else — budget, team structure, production models — is a separate problem.

Changing Your Mindset Isn’t Enough

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 17/07/2026

Benjamin Carssage, former Riot producer, sums up the AAA crisis in a single sentence in this video: record budgets, bigger teams than ever, longer timelines than ever — and the success rate still dropping. His diagnosis is that it all comes down to two missing ingredients: real leadership and real product thinking. Nobody inside these machines asks themselves why a player would choose this game anymore. They just ask whether the milestone was hit.

I agree, and it hits close to home. At my first job in a social games studio, my manager asked me to copy FarmVille’s progression curve wholesale onto a blackjack game we were working on. I had to explain what a mathematical function actually is before he could understand why a curve designed for a farming game couldn’t simply be transplanted onto a card game. The response: just do it anyway.

The video lands on four solid recommendations and frames them almost like a shift in posture.

Hire real leaders
Find the vision
Don’t scale too soon
Validate with players first.

All correct — but far harder to pull off than the list makes it sound, for two reasons in particular.

The first is that the incentives need to change. Things work this way because leaders are paid to behave this way. You can hire the most courageous person in the world: if the system punishes anyone who looks like they want to pump the brakes, that person either falls into line or walks. Trying to change people’s mindset without touching what gets rewarded is pure wishful thinking.

The second is that the video underestimates how much time and money the transition actually takes. You need cycles of failed projects before an organisation genuinely learns; teams also need to hire a very different kind of person from the ones their current recruitment processes look for — generalists whose whole job is hunting for new ideas.

“Find the fun” is easy to say, but it takes a certain intentionality that goes well beyond Gantt charts. It takes taste, artistic intent — things that are hard to justify when it looks like you’re just messing around. It’s easier to do in smaller, more agile setups, which look set to be the near future of this industry.

The Future is Network and Lore

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 15/07/2026

The post today starts from this article by Seth Godin on disposable software.

Godin’s point is that software, even though it’s invisible, portable, and weightless, used to last. Building something complex took years and thousands of people to maintain it. Even a complex website could be considered a durable technical asset.

Now, with new technologies sitting on anyone’s desk, writing new software is often easier than maintaining the old stuff. We’re in the middle of an explosion of temporary software that will make everything that came before it look small.

Even Apple and Google are significantly increasing app approval times on their stores, because of “vibe coding.”

What endures

There’s one thing, Godin says, that holds up through all of this: the network. When an organisation sits at the centre of a network, it doesn’t matter if a competitor builds something shinier and newer. The network stays right where it is. A living network is worth more today than ever, which is why people keep choosing to stay “here” rather than “go somewhere else.”

The connection to discs

I wrote about Sony stopping physical disc production. Put together, these two pieces make me think about an uncomfortable question: can the future of games be built on disposable games?

With the right tools, a small team today can prototype and test in weeks a game that ten years ago would have taken a full year. I find concepts like this fascinating. If game software becomes throwaway, the relationship with the player risks becoming throwaway too: play, consume, discard, move on to the next thing.

But exactly as Godin says, what endures isn’t the individual product — it’s the network. A publisher that has built a living community, a lore players have grown attached to, maybe an ecosystem of creators and guilds, doesn’t lose ground just because a competitor has shipped a better-looking game. The real competitive advantage, in the games industry as anywhere else, is shifting more and more from the product to the network around it.

Perhaps the right question for anyone designing games today is no longer “how long will this game last?” but “how long will the network of people around it last?”

Things to Change

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 10/07/2026

Yesterday, two pieces of news dropped almost simultaneously. The first: WARN filings confirmed that the layoffs are hitting real studios — ZeniMax Online Studios (The Elder Scrolls Online) and Id Software (Doom), entire technical departments wiped out.

The second: the US Federal Reserve appointed Asha Sharma, CEO of Xbox, as an adviser to its task force on “Productivity and Jobs”, with a specific brief to study the macroeconomic impact of Artificial Intelligence. She is the only sitting CEO across all of the Fed’s task forces.

Cutting jobs on one side, being called in to advise the government on how to protect them on the other. A system working exactly as designed.

To understand why carrying out mass redundancies aligns with — rather than conflicts with — institutional recognition in corporate and financial circles, three structural factors are worth unpacking.

1. How productivity gets defined

In macroeconomic models, productivity is calculated as output per unit of labour. When leadership reduces headcount while using automation to maintain the same output, financial and regulatory institutions see a successful operational optimisation.

2. The AI integration mandate

Boards and central banks prioritise leaders with a background like Ms. Sharma’s. The primary goal is to understand how emerging general-purpose technologies can compress linear production costs and reshape future labour allocation as an asset.

Someone who has already demonstrated they can do it in-house — cutting thousands of positions while promising significantly higher output — is exactly the profile you want at a table tasked with writing the rules for everyone else.

3. The asymmetry of risk and accountability

Game developers carry product-specific risk: if the game doesn’t land, the team feels it directly and immediately.

Executives, by contrast, manage systemic risk, spread across entire portfolios and over years. In capital markets, executing mass layoffs to protect margins is codified as standard fiduciary responsibility — and that strengthens an executive’s profile for institutional and advisory roles.

The people at ZeniMax Online and Id Software spent years — in some cases over a decade — building the output that is now being measured as recovered productivity.

What remains

This divergence points to a precise structural reality: the metrics that financial systems use to reward executive performance operate in complete independence from the long-term retention of creative and technical talent, and from the moral obligations of any company.

I want to close with a line from the late Adriano Olivetti, a great Italian industrialist: “A factory cannot look only at the profit index. It must distribute wealth, culture, services, democracy. I think of the factory for the person, not the person for the factory.”

The Game Designer’s Creed

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 08/07/2026

Seth Godin published yesterday The Builder’s Creed, a rewrite of Christian Larson’s old Optimist’s Creed (1911), filtered through Reid Hoffman’s recent thinking on what it means to build something in an era that constantly asks itself whether it’s still worth doing. I read it twice, and the second time I thought: we game designers should have one of our own. We’re builders too — it’s just that what we build doesn’t exist until it takes shape in someone else’s head.

It brought to mind the opening of Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design, where he points out that game design isn’t one craft but many (engineer, storyteller, psychologist, mathematician), all held together by a single skill: listening. Listening to the game taking shape under your hands, listening to players, listening to your gut when something feels off before you can even put it into a slide.

Towards myself

I’ll remember that the game isn’t the pieces, the code, or the document: it’s the experience the player builds in their own head, and I design for that, not for the slide.
I’ll trust the build more than the document: less talk, more substance!
I’ll listen to my gut when something feels wrong, even before I can prove it with data.
I’ll stay a beginner in at least one discipline outside games, because the best ideas in this industry almost always come from people who didn’t start here.

Towards the work

I’ll ship the build, not just the document about the build.
I’ll protect the vision the project was born from, before a spreadsheet starts editing it.
I’ll treat content as a means to reach an experience, never as the goal itself.
I’ll hold inspiration and pragmatism together: the vision that gives a game its soul, and the market that keeps the lights on.

Towards players

Players are people, not funnels. I design for what they’ll remember, not just for what they’ll spend.
I won’t confuse a compulsive loop with a fun one. I know the difference exists even when the metrics don’t show it.
I’ll make the work behind the game visible whenever I can: it’s the only real antidote to people taking everything for granted.

Towards the industry

I’ll hire for curiosity, not years of experience. This industry runs on outsiders.
I’ll say my trade-offs out loud, instead of letting a KPI take the blame for them down the line.
I’ll keep believing that a better industry is buildable. Buildable, one honest game at a time.

I wrote this quickly, almost on a whim. Like the Sagrada Família, it’ll need revisiting scaffold by scaffold.

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