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Tag: inspiration

Building Worlds at the Right Pace

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 31/07/2026

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Denshattack: Return to the Dream

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 16/07/2026

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

A few days ago I came across a video on the Modern Classic channel about what’s been happening in the games industry lately. Physical discs disappearing, film licences being pulled from people’s accounts, sudden restructurings at major publishers.

But the part that really got me was the way it reconstructs how we ended up here — specifically the section about the Dreamcast.

The business model the Dreamcast took to its grave

For the first twenty years of gaming, a console was the vehicle for the games of whoever built it. You bought an Atari to play Atari games, an Intellivision for Mattel games, a Super Nintendo for Mario and Zelda, a Genesis for Sonic. Third parties existed, but were sometimes seen as almost diluting the identity of the machine.

Then Sony arrived with the PlayStation, and from that point the console became a generic platform — the business was in royalties from third parties, and whoever had the most volume won.

The Dreamcast was the last system built seriously around the old model, grounded in a powerful arcade identity and a massive first-party catalogue. At the time it looked like a system that couldn’t lose.

And yet Sony simply squeezed Sega out of the hardware business through sheer size. Which is exactly why the Dreamcast’s failure still stings today: it’s the symbolic end of the idea that a console should have an identity, a personality, a reason to exist beyond “taking a cut of every sale”. From that point on, the video argues, everything drifted towards the bean counters — live service, monetising the same game indefinitely instead of making a great one and selling it.

Denshattack: that spirit isn’t entirely dead

The day after watching that video I bought Denshattack!, which came out on 15 July. The premise, in a single line, is gloriously absurd: it’s an action-platformer where you pilot an anti-gravity train that does tricks and grinds on rails like Tony Hawk, inside a wildly colourful Japanese fantasy, all in service of dismantling a corrupt corporation. “Tony Hawk, but your skateboard is a train.”

A small studio (Undercoders) believed in that idea, built a strong and instantly recognisable art direction around it, and made something designed simply to be played and to be fun from the very first minute.

Denshattack gave me the same physical feeling I had as a kid turning on the Dreamcast: an idea that exists because someone wanted it to exist, not because the market asked for it. Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Space Channel 5, Rez — these came from people who had a clear vision in their heads and an equally clear aesthetic, and pushed them out whole, without sanding down the edges.

An interesting case study

Two tools I often use when analysing a concept turn out to be directly relevant to this Dreamcast/Denshattack comparison.

The first is what I call fantasy extraction: before you even look at the systems, ask yourself who the player becomes and what they should feel in the best moments.
“You’re a train grinding rails to take down a corporation” is a fantasy you can’t mistake for anything else — exactly the same kind of clarity the Sega mascots of the Dreamcast era had.

The second is the novelty spectrum audit: every original concept sits somewhere between too familiar and too new, and the trick isn’t to maximise novelty for its own sake, but to understand what kind of innovation you’re actually doing. Denshattack recombines trick-based skating physics with a subject — the train, the dystopia — that nobody had ever thought to pair with it. It’s innovation by recombination: familiar enough to read in three seconds of trailer, strange enough to stick in your head.

“We’ve lost the reason consoles exist,” the video said in its conclusion. It leaves me with a very concrete urge to keep designing things with a sharp fantasy and genuine novelty, rather than filing them down until nobody finds them offensive. I hope Denshattack turns out to be proof that audiences reward that kind of thinking.

The Future is Network and Lore

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 15/07/2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

  1. 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.
  2. I’ll trust the build more than the document: less talk, more substance!
  3. I’ll listen to my gut when something feels wrong, even before I can prove it with data.
  4. 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

  1. I’ll ship the build, not just the document about the build.
  2. I’ll protect the vision the project was born from, before a spreadsheet starts editing it.
  3. I’ll treat content as a means to reach an experience, never as the goal itself.
  4. 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

  1. Players are people, not funnels. I design for what they’ll remember, not just for what they’ll spend.
  2. I won’t confuse a compulsive loop with a fun one. I know the difference exists even when the metrics don’t show it.
  3. 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

  1. I’ll hire for curiosity, not years of experience. This industry runs on outsiders.
  2. I’ll say my trade-offs out loud, instead of letting a KPI take the blame for them down the line.
  3. 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.

Billions and Billions…

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 07/07/2026

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

Yesterday Microsoft published a note signed by the new Xbox CEO, Asha Sharma, titled “Resetting Xbox”. Inside, two pieces of news are placed side by side, as if they were the same thing.

The first: roughly 1,600 people are out today, with up to 3,200 more by fiscal year 2027. Four studios — Compulsion Games, Double Fine, Ninja Theory, Undead Labs — are leaving the Xbox fold, through some combination of returning to independence and passing to “new ownership”. Stated reason: “in a typical year, we lost 64 cents for every dollar we invested” in these studios.

The second, in the same document: Sharma says she wants to bring Xbox to “entertain more than one billion people every day.”

Let’s run the numbers, because the numbers don’t add up.

A billion a day

The latest public figure for Xbox puts the active user base at around 500 million monthly active users (MAU) across the whole console + PC + cloud ecosystem. Daily active users (DAU) are always a fraction of monthly ones — the ratio is called “stickiness”. For a free, frictionless product like Facebook, that ratio sits around 65–70%. For a gaming platform, where playing requires a console, a subscription, and actual free time, the ratio is much lower. I’ll be generous: 20%.

That puts my estimate of Xbox’s current DAU at around 100 million people.

The stated target is one billion. The gap to close is 900 million more people who need to open Xbox every single day.

For context: there are roughly 8.2 billion people in the world. One billion daily active users means 12% of all humanity, every day, without exception. The only platforms that touch that threshold today are Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok — all free, all installable in ten seconds, none requiring hardware to buy, and all of them spent well over a decade building to that scale.

How fast would you need to grow

If the target is to reach one billion in 5 years (the typical horizon for a strategic plan), starting from 100 million today, you’d need compound growth of 58% per year, every year, for five years running.

Stretch the horizon to 10 years, and the required rate drops — but it’s still enormous: 26% per year, for a decade.

There is no example in the history of gaming of a paid, hardware-bound platform sustaining that kind of growth starting from an already-mature base of 100+ million users in saturated markets like the US and UK. TikTok grew like that, but from zero, for free, on every phone on the planet. Xbox is starting from a very different place, with very different constraints.

The maths on the cuts

Let’s do the cost calculation too, since the document practically invites it by citing that “64 cents for every dollar invested”.

A fully-loaded employment cost (salary + benefits + overhead) for a AAA creative role runs, conservatively, somewhere between $150,000 and $200,000 a year. Cut 1,600 people today and the annual saving is roughly $300 million. Get to 3,200 by FY27, and you’re looking at around $600 million a year.

In 2023, Microsoft paid $69 billion for Activision Blizzard. At $600 million a year in savings from the current cuts, it would take over 100 years to “recover” that figure purely by laying off the people who made the games. Which should make one thing pretty clear: these cuts aren’t “fixing” any P&L. They’re just shifting the burden onto the people who never had any say in that spending.

And another detail, also from the same document: platform teams are “40% larger compared to the start of this generation, even as the player base and hours played have declined.” Internal headcount grew 40% while engagement was falling — and yet the ones being let go are the studios that were actually making the games. That’s indefensible.

Try to imagine

Try to put yourself in the shoes of one of the creatives who joined an independent studio during the very years Microsoft was buying everything up to build Game Pass. They’d hired you to make wild, original things. The money was there, the salary was good.

Then, years later, Microsoft pays $69 billion for Activision Blizzard. In 2024, Call of Duty launches day one on Game Pass Ultimate.

And today the email arrives. 1,600 people out today, 3,200 by next year. Your studio is one of the four being sold off or spun out.

Markets shift, currencies swing, funds buy companies and hollow them out overnight. That risk comes with the territory, I know. But this feels different. No currency crashed. The people who spent $69 billion on Activision, who put Call of Duty into a subscription and ate over $300 million in lost sales, who pushed Game Pass to $29.99 a month — those people have been gone for a while now.

The new CEO, Asha Sharma, wasn’t even in the games industry when those decisions were made. She’s just the one holding the memo today, candidly acknowledging that “in a typical year, we lost 64 cents for every dollar we invested” in those studios. The people who built exactly what they’d been asked to build are the ones getting the email. The people who made the calls have already cashed out or moved on.

On the same day she announces the cuts, the CEO declares she wants to bring Xbox to “entertain more than one billion people every day” — a target that, as we’ve seen, would require multiplying the current daily active user base by ten, while letting go of a fifth of the team who were supposed to help build it.

The bill always lands with the same people

The market takes its cut from everyone — I get that. What I find indefensible is that the people who make the wild bets get paid upfront, in bonuses and packages, precisely for having made the bet. Then the bet doesn’t pay off, as was entirely foreseeable, and they walk away clean regardless. The bill only arrives for the people who never had a vote on the decision.

If you’re one of the creatives caught up in this, you didn’t fail. The bet failed, and you weren’t even at the table when it was placed. Your craft, your ten years of shipped games — that stays yours and travels with you wherever you go next. I’d rather see that talent land somewhere that genuinely values what it’s built, than read another memo saying “we lost 64 cents on every dollar”. If you’re hiring, or you know someone who is, this is a good week to say so.

Nobody Is Born Great

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 03/07/2026

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 belief, among the finance people who now call the shots in my beloved industry, that because we’re in a large, mature sector, the only sensible move is to invest in things that are bigger, shinier, better.

But getting to bigger and better generally means going through smaller first. Anyone who’s studied the history of video games can see that easily enough.

There’s a video I watched yesterday on YouTube where Ross, a data scientist at Game Oracle, does exactly that: he analysed sales data from over 62,000 developers on Steam. The figure that struck me most is that only one in five developers publishes a second game. Those who stay in the game through to their fourth or fifth title see their chances of a significant hit climb from one in ten to something close to a coin flip. That’s compounding advantage — reusable code, a community built over time, a genuine understanding of what actually works.

Statistically, the Call of Dutys of tomorrow will come from something that would make a major VC smile politely and move on today. It’s worth looking at how the giants we have now actually got started.

Minecraft: one man, very little money, and a lot of drive

Markus “Notch” Persson wrote the first version of Minecraft alone, at home, drawing inspiration from Infiniminer and Dwarf Fortress. On 17 May 2009 he uploaded an alpha to the indie forum TIGSource and sold it for $10, with no marketing plan whatsoever. There was a rough prototype and a community that started sending back feedback, ideas, mods. That loop between a lone developer and his community became, over the years, the best-selling game in history.

Fortnite: a game that was struggling

Before Battle Royale, Fortnite was “Save the World” — a PvE building-and-survival mode that Epic Games had spent years developing, released in 2017 to a fairly muted reception. When PUBG blew the battle royale genre wide open, a small internal team (the same one working on Unreal Tournament) repurposed the existing engine and assets to build the new mode in roughly two months. It was supposed to stay in the background, locked behind a purchase of Save the World.

It only became standalone and free-to-play in the final rush before launch — more out of necessity than vision.

If they’d been shut down straight away? Well, it would have been lost.

Call of Duty: a brand-new studio, 22 people, $1.5 million

Infinity Ward was founded in 2002 by Vince Zampella, Grant Collier, and Jason West, veterans of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. The entire founding team — 22 people — came from that same previous project. Activision invested $1.5 million for a 30% stake in the studio, a modest sum even by the PC standards of the time. The first Call of Duty, released in 2003, was a solid game but nothing like the phenomenon we know today. It took another three entries before Modern Warfare, in 2007, turned the series into the hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars franchise it is now.

The real investment is staying in the game

None of these three giants was born as a “big, ambitious, best-in-class” bet. They started small — often inside projects that were struggling or studios that had barely formed — and only became enormous after multiple iterations, second attempts, and communities nurtured over time.

If you’re an investor, the right question is how long you can afford to let a team stay in the game long enough to land on the right project. If you’re a developer, the job is to finish the game in front of you, ship it, and use it as the foundation for the next one.

Creativity needs direction and constraints, but it can’t survive this new start-up mindset of wanting everything at once and right now. That’s not how you build the industry of the future — investment needs vision too.

PlayStation stops discs: the stick without the carrot

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 02/07/2026

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

Today’s post starts from this piece of news: Sony is ending physical disc production for new PlayStation games from January 2028.

For me, when you’re doing marketing there are always three relationships to keep an eye on: the one with your customers (obvious), the one with your partners, and the one with your peers. On all three counts, this move looks poorly handled.

With players

Sony has chosen to alienate a significant chunk of its own users. There’s a bit of confusion around that “20%” figure floating about — it’s not entirely clear what it actually represents. Sony reports roughly 80% digital sales versus 20% physical in the last fiscal year: that figure describes sales, not people. A handful of collectors who buy almost exclusively on disc is enough to generate that 20% of sales, without representing a fifth of the fanbase. That said, the underlying point still stands: there’s a real audience, far from negligible, for whom this news means their collection stops here.

I understand the move makes sense if you want to control the entire supply chain and improve margins, but I don’t understand the coldness of the execution. They could have offered an alternative plan rather than simply closing the book. The model of a physical object as a permanent access key already exists and is well proven: Nintendo’s amiibo unlock content through a toy that remains yours and resaleable, Limited Run Games has built an entire business selling physical editions with a code for games that would otherwise be digital-only — and people snap them up — collector’s editions with steelbooks and a code are now a standard that publishers use to monetise attachment to the physical object.

Sony could do the same thing at scale — with a figurine, a book, a collectible artefact that guarantees lifetime access to the game: a reason to keep buying physical even in a digital-first world.

With commercial partners

Sony has also managed to antagonise its main distribution channels. The response from Meridiem was blunt and direct: some things aren’t downloaded, they’re felt, with a promise to resist. And they’re not alone: GAME responded with “it’s time to defend what matters to us”, Tesura Games openly called for the decision to be reversed.

I don’t know who makes these calls at Sony, but with partners you act before you publish a blog post, not after. Now Sony will have to find the carrot to offer after already swinging the stick.

With competitors

The major publishers, Nintendo aside, seem to be almost competing to see who can upset their audience the most. I don’t always buy physical — I buy a lot digitally — but knowing that I could no longer choose even if I wanted to stings a bit, and maybe makes me feel a little more distant from this industry I claim to love.

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