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Tag: insight

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!

Eagles Dressed as Pigeons

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 19/08/2026

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

Sometimes we romanticise work to the point of ignoring that moment — which always comes — when we start running on autopilot. We begin measuring our value by the time we put into something, without thinking about the actual outcome or what we’re really delivering to players.

I’ve often found myself in situations where colleagues were clocking loads of extra hours just for the sake of it, or because they’d been pulled into this endless loop. Which inevitably leads to poor project estimates, treating things as feasible when they simply wouldn’t be without the overtime — overtime that, for the most part, adds no real value to the game.

I can’t change those attitudes, though I’ve tried. But I don’t fall into that trap either — I don’t do unnecessary extra hours, especially unpaid ones.

Disagree and commit

These days I’d rather focus on my own work than get into debates, because I’ve noticed people get defensive pretty quickly.

On one hand, I work on what I’ve been assigned, always trying to deliver on time and with something extra thrown in. On the other, I keep proposing improvements on whatever initial vision I’m given. They’re rarely accepted, but the exercise helps me think through the product — and it also signals what I’m capable of.

  • A client’s game is not my game
  • If a client asks me to design a half-baked feature, I first design it exactly as they’ve described
  • Then I offer what I’d consider an improvement, without pushing it. If the client says no, it’s no. Again — not my game.

Show, don’t argue

In a lot of organisations — bigger companies especially, where people go through incredibly elaborate hiring processes and are expected to show up with an impressive track record — verbal disagreements are very often read as personal attacks. Particularly in remote settings, without face-to-face contact, I’ve found that either I’m rubbish at arguing my corner, or people are just too proud to budge.

If I want a design change, I never raise it in the meeting. For me, meetings are a tool for one thing only: showing you want to work as a team, and giving people credit. What I’d rather do is present the requested version alongside a quick prototype of the improved one.

Eagles don’t crunch

I’m like an eagle — I fly high, and occasionally I dive to solve a concrete problem. A lot of clients want me to be a pigeon: fly low, peck around, make a mess here and there.

I have the experience to work efficiently. I don’t need to put in more hours than necessary. I’d rather focus on delivering high-quality work within my contracted hours. I always back other people’s ideas, however odd, but when my day is done, I switch off.

And if they’re paying me eagle rates to do pigeon work — fine by me. Less responsibility.

Professionalism Above All

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 14/08/2026

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.

Reflections on Mobile and Premium

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 12/08/2026

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

Things We Cannot Control

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 11/08/2026

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

Watch this:

Things like this put me in a difficult headspace. On one hand, I feel all those emotions that led me to choose this career path in the first place. On the other, though, there’s this strange sense of sadness. I’m aware that it’s very unlikely I’ll ever put my name on something so memorable that its soundtrack gets played at GDC in that kind of spine-tingling way.

And not for lack of wanting — let’s be clear about that. But there are a number of things I can’t control, which may or may not put me on the right path. I mean, just imagine hearing the music from your game being played, and catching those little yelps of excitement from the audience who loved the experience.

That’s the ultimate goal I’m chasing in everything I do, but it doesn’t depend on me alone. It depends on a huge number of factors, most of which are out of my hands. The most likely outcome, if we’re being honest with ourselves, is that something like that will never happen. My career will never reach those kinds of milestones — if you just look at the numbers.

That’s why I choose to focus on the journey, not the destination. I’m not really the type who goes “I believe in this game, so I’ll develop it on my own if I have to, because it needs to exist.” I’m someone who grew up — in terms of play and culture — in tabletop RPG clubs. In nerd circles, listening to alternative music, never dressing fashionably. Actually having a real disdain for trends. Today I’m different; I’m still that guy, but also a man with his own values, and my goal is to pass those things on to others. I focus more on my relationships with the people I work with, with my team.

Because, sad as it may be, it’s the truth: in all likelihood, I’ll never work on something that becomes truly memorable. But what matters is to keep working with passion on whatever comes my way.

The Taste of Results

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 06/08/2026

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

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:

  1. Whether the direction we’re heading in is the wrong one (but they won’t tell us if it’s the right one)
  2. 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

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