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Tag: professional

Ways to lose the game

Published by Paolo on 29/10/2025

Since 2016 I worked as a freelancer for many realities. This fact gave me certain insight on the typical mistakes leaders, product managers, and producers, do when they decide on the strategy to follow.

1️⃣ Starting with the Metrics

“Data” is just an unformed, meaningless glob until you apply a creative hypothesis to it. You need to start with the “why” and the “what if,” not the number on the spreadsheet or the curve you saw on Sensor Tower. Stop treating data as a god; treat it as a confusing cloud of information. Your goal is to get your references at the start, not make decisions on them. Decisions have to be made on what makes you (you, intended as a team) special.

2️⃣ Seeking Consensus

Good strategy is always contrarian. If everyone in the room agrees that your next game should be “Fortnite, but with dragons,” be terrified. Consensus, by definition, is average. Have you read the Age of Average? This is how it starts. If everybody is doing something in the market, that something is not disruptive anymore. Follow others is not a good strategy, it can be a tactic for a while. But your goal as a leader is to create the right strategy to disrupt.

3️⃣ Providing a Goal, Not a Strategy

Many “strategies” are actually goals dressed up in fancy slides. “We need to hit X million MAU.” Okay, but how? That’s a target, not a strategy. KPIs are indicators used to understand many things; among them, you can also understand if you reached a specific goal of course. But the goal has to be something like “invent a new genre”, or “make the most downloaded free puzzle game on Steam”. Something achievable, of course, but ambitious.

4️⃣ Running a Strategy Workshop

You can’t expect creative strategy on a timetable, or to arise from a formula. Strategy emerges messily over time. In the shower, in the gaps between the work (remember my “eureka” moment?). It doesn’t come from a neat stack of Post-Its. I have been in plenty ultra long workshops where in the end nothing happened.

5️⃣ Putting Strategy in the Calendar

Strategy isn’t a “task” that you “schedule,” like an art review. It occurs in the unprompted, serendipitous moments that surprise you. It’s always on, somehow. It emerges from nuances, suddenly. Do the work, think as a strategist and it will come. And if not, you already have a strategy: shut down the project and stop losing money.

6️⃣ Looking for Proof

All strategy is a punt. A gamble. You can get some validation from soft-launch metrics, sure. But you’ll never be certain. The only proof you’ll find is by trying it. Stop looking for certainty; the real world is a chaos engine. These podcasts that only speak bad about the others? These “pundits” are not really in the game, they are judging from the outside many times. Again, do your work, step by step, every single day.

7️⃣ Making it Many Things, Not One Thing

Strategy is not a “list of stuff” (e.g., “We will integrate blockchain, launch F2P, and focus on narrative”). Strategy is one thing: the core fantasy, the single unique hook. Then organize and define the list of stuff you’re going to do. If you can’t point to that one thing, it doesn’t exist. Players want something important, not stuff to play.

8️⃣ Mistaking Boring for Intelligent

Man, with all those charts, all that jargon, and all that complexity, this strategy MUST be good! Ha, no. This isn’t a research paper for a thesis committee. It needs to be exciting—it needs to motivate the team, or it will never make a great game. Boring is fatal. And the team is probably composed by people really passionate about games.

9️⃣ Asking the Customer

Yes, of course, you must speak to the Player. But this doesn’t mean you should ask them what you should build and then build it. If it was that easy, every studio would be printing money. Their job is to tell you what they hate and what they love of what you are doing; your job is to build what they didn’t know they needed. It’s hard, very hard, but that’s the only way I know.

🔟 Hiding Your Opinions

You are not objective. Your strategy isn’t objective. And it shouldn’t be! Strategy is about making a choice. A subjective, opinionated bet. Those who embrace the fact that it’s all opinions and commit to them are the ones who master it.

The biggest lie in modern tech

Published by Paolo on 28/10/2025

It’s time we look at reality. That quote that rules your strategic meetings? The one that says, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”?

Peter Drucker REALLY said the exact opposite:

“By the time it can be captured in numbers, it’s too late.” — ‘The Effective Executive’, page 17

Let’s talk about the Big Lie that’s ruining your creative game.

The Glitch in the Matrix

The whole mess started long before Drucker was dragged in. It began with V. F. Ridgway in 1956, who said:

“What gets measured gets managed—even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation to do so.”

Ridgway was telling us metrics are a bug, not a feature. Yet, somehow, this became the metric gospel we use to justify every pointless KPI.

And Drucker? He was advocating for perceptual thinking, for capturing the OPPORTUNITY (the “Rare Dot”) before it becomes a measurable fact. Because, just like when your competitor releases the perfect game before you do, once it’s a fact, it’s already too late.

The McKinsey Gold Rush and the Final Boss
Then came the 1980s. IT systems made everything measurable, and consulting firms smelled money. It was a Gold Rush in the form of selling software and services. They needed an authority to market their new Surveillance Manuals.

Their move was an act of pure intellectual dishonesty. Drucker’s real ideas were too nuanced, too complex. So, too uncommercializable. They needed a punchy, two-button slogan.

Their solution?

REENGINEER DRUCKER!

Take his wisdom, strip away the subtlety, simplify it into a powerful tool that justifies their entire business model: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

It’s like using a quote from Orwell’s 1984 to sell the very surveillance system it warns against. A brilliant, deceptive move that made the modern business model bulletproof, but creatively soulless.

Your Trojan Horse
Look around your industry. This Big Lie is the system that’s deceiving everyone into playing the wrong game.

Consultants see it. Risk managers see it. Even some economists see it. But few people stop playing pretend. They think the whole system—their career, their salary, their social validation—will collapse if they dare point out the obvious.

IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THAT WAY.

You don’t need to “burn the boats.” You just need to stop chasing past facts and start focusing on Rare Dots.

Build a small Trojan Horse: a deeply personal, perceptually driven project or strategy, that the metric-driven system itself cannot play pretend with. Find your own “why” and let the metrics follow, not lead.

Stop knocking

Published by Paolo on 27/10/2025

Imagine a big gate. Behind that gate lies the success of the game you are making. Now, imagine you are standing right in front of it. Suddenly, you hear a voice:

“Why should you enter this gate?”

This voice represents all the Players. They want a single, compelling reason for you to gain access to that success.

You could start by listing the good qualities of your game—it’s like sending a resume: “This game does this and that.” Or, you could tell them the game is simply proof that you can make games, which isn’t a terrible argument, considering 80% of games never see the light. You could even beg them to let you in, like a personal favor, so you can continue making games.

Sending resumes, trying to prove things to strangers, or begging will probably not make them open the gate for you. In fact, they need a real will to open the gate in the first place.

Whether you’re looking for a job or selling your game, try to avoid the “gate situation.” Build your own stand outside of the walls, show off your merchandise, and let them invite you in.

We are based on deadlines

Published by Paolo on 26/10/2025

The games industry is a deadline-based industry. That’s why you often see terrible practices like crunch. Crunch is typically concentrated in the last few weeks of a project, and it is fundamentally a management failure. Systemic crunch makes things unsustainable. People will become stressed, burn out, and quit—and this could eventually damage the entire industry.

Great games are made by teams that strive for success. If you are both ambitious and smart, you can design a game to be sustainable. But you must be acutely aware of deadlines and accept that our sector is based on them, because you can’t really control everything else.

Vision and clocks

Published by Paolo on 23/10/2025

Recently, I was hired for a gig as a fractional leader on a new genre. The team was skilled and talented, and the environment was fantastic. Also, the vision was clear, and my client was very creative. Without even noticing it, I worked lots of hours—much more, actually, than the hours I billed.

Some time ago, I was working on another project with a different client. The vision was messy and definitely not based on anything apart from personal opinions. The team was split across multiple projects, and the goals weren’t clear. Someone told me on a Monday, “I wrote you the whole weekend over Slack, where have you been?” And I answered, “I’m sorry, I don’t work on weekends.”

I believe that crunch is a systemic issue in our industry, and since we have pipelines, it’s avoidable. However, a team truly aiming for success will always have certain members willing to work extra to contribute to a good project. If someone asks me to work more, I will probably be reluctant. But when I feel I want to, I am happy to work extra hours. Things aren’t always black and white.

Collage of features

Published by Paolo on 22/10/2025

I met a colleague yesterday who is working on a project with no clear vision. Because of this, plans are constantly shifting, and prototypes are discarded just by pointing a finger to the sky. There is no one accountable for the game’s vision; the Creative Director is the company founder, and of course, he cannot be fired. The game feels like a collage of features, not a proper, cohesive experience.

I told him that this is very common, and it’s one of the main reasons behind the failure of so many games. Someone years ago said that 80% of games never see the light. This is why: you don’t have a clear vision of the experience you want to deliver. You only decide on the genre, and then you add, “but we’ll make it more casual,” without even intensively playing those kinds of games. You aren’t connecting with the audience. You aren’t willing to embark on the creative journey for real. So, you end up trying out things, making one prototype, not properly evaluating the results, and then moving on to something else—like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.

Maybe something will stick, and in rare cases, you might even get lucky and make some money. But that is not the way you build long-lasting, billion-dollar games.

Motivation and performance

Published by Paolo on 20/10/2025

I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago, and I noticed the absence of a couple of friends. I met one of them on Saturday, and he’d been laid off from the company where he used to work. He explained it was due to a low score on his performance review, and then he was out in the next round of layoffs. Now he’s going to take a break; he got a decent severance and can take the time to reflect on what to do next. He looked tired and somehow older.

His partner was with him, and she was worried about the instability of the games industry. She told me that she doesn’t know what he should do. Her eyes, though, suggested that the answer lies outside of the industry. And yes, if you look for stability, games are probably one of the worst fields in tech nowadays.

Performance reviews are fundamentally biased. First of all, I’ve always noticed certain affinities within companies that inevitably lead to better reviews. Second, we are not cyborgs (at least, not yet). You join a company for a specific project, and then you are moved to another one you don’t really like. But a job is a job, and you have to go on. Then you witness questionable choices or no choices at all being made. And you are expected to stay there, with energy and motivation, performing.

Well, to me, it just doesn’t work like that. Performance reviews should be normalized by taking into account the real motivation of teams toward a project. Very often, especially big companies embark on odysseys to basically copy existing success stories. That is something that brings entire teams down, and of course, there are casualties—people who simply cannot continue working as before on something they clearly don’t believe in.

This friend was one of them. I know it because last year he told me something like, “The project is clearly going nowhere, but you know: it’s a job.” Which is the normal thing to think when they put you to work on something you don’t believe. You cannot just refuse to employ your mind on that game that is going nowhere. You have to push, but if the forces abandon you it’s not your fault.

The AI Counter Wave

Published by Tj'ièn Twijnstra on 18/10/2025

Our relationship with AI is still very much in development, like our relationship with other technologies, it will be shaped by time and usage. Take our smart phones, we seemingly can’t live without it, but school and parents seem to try and keep our kids away from them – at least for a while. AI is a different beast all together, but pros and cons are discussed daily everywhere. It seems that the technology is fundamental and it already affects many peoples lives.

It seems there’s a double standard that many are not aware of they possess. For instance, I noticed how recruiters and managers seem to praise AI in their work. Summarizing batches of resumes, auto filtering great from good candidates and offloading batches of work to optimize their workflow. AI is great! But when candidates use AI to write the perfect cover letter, create position based resumes and extraordinary motivations, recruiters and managers seem to hate and automatically deny the application. This is a double standard where the technology seems to be both great and very bad at the same time and in many cases this double standard isn’t felt by the person who possesses it.

But I think this double standard provides a clue to what the counter wave of AI will be. I believe all things come in pairs of opposites. Light and darkness exist only in relation to each other, like noise and silence, like chaos and order. AI will create a zest for CounterAI, the deeply personal, the things that exist because of effort and human suffering. The recruiter and managers that make their work impersonal and soulless by using AI to sift through their candidates demand heartfelt personal motivational letters and carefully crafted resumes with a clear human touch. AI will expose the need for humans to grow through hardship, suffering, commitment and purpose. Like microwave meals make you hungry for your mother’s favorite dish, so to will AI make you hungry for the purpose full and human.

The Console Business Has an Accessibility Problem

Published by Paolo on 13/10/2025

When I started playing games, the controller was a simple D-pad and two buttons, A and B. As I grew, the industry added more buttons and sticks. Today, we have at least 21 buttons, two sticks, and a D-pad.

What if you’re a kid just starting to play video games? Today, you have to choose between a complex controller or a mobile game like Roblox, where your friends probably already are. Maybe they’re on Fortnite, in which case you’ll still have to learn how to use the controller.

But let’s face it: it’s harder than before. On top of that, add all the time you “lose” by waiting for your game to appear. It wasn’t like that before; you inserted the cartridge and got the game immediately on screen. No need for loading, connecting, updates, and so on.

In my opinion, the console business needs to understand and fix this accessibility issue if they truly want to improve their market reach.

Regulatory missteps

Published by Paolo on 11/10/2025

I recently read the New European Consumer Protection Guidelines for Virtual Currencies in Video Games after days of discussion on the topic. On one hand, I feel proud to live on a continent that prioritizes consumer protection, but on the other, I’m worried that regulators fundamentally misunderstand our industry.

I’ve worked mostly in casual mobile free-to-play (F2P). Development usually involves at least six months for the first version, followed by a ‘soft launch’ period of 5 to 15 months, where we figure out metrics, tune the performance marketing strategy, and tweak the economy—often without making any profit.

Successful F2P games operate somewhat like luxury goods. The business is primarily sustained by superfans (call them whales or big spenders). Crucially, even in games where the typical player might be a parent or older adult, these superfans are generally heavy gamers who also buy and play many console and PC titles. For example, the biggest spender in Royal Kingdom is likely an Elden Ring player, not a grandmother saving money for her grandkids.

Regarding the new regulations, three points are particularly worrisome:

  1. Clear and Transparent Price Indication: The price of in-game content or services must be shown in both in-game currency and real-world money, ensuring players can make informed decisions about their purchases.
  2. Avoiding Practices That Obscure Pricing: Game developers should not engage in tactics that obscure the true cost of digital content. This includes practices like mixing different in-game currencies or requiring multiple exchanges to make purchases.
  3. No Forced Purchases: Developers should not design games that force consumers to spend more money on in-game currencies than necessary. Players should be able to choose the exact amount of currency they wish to purchase.

I understand the underlying goal, but these rules reveal a fundamental ignorance of game design and development:

  1. Inflation and Value: Virtual items and currencies constantly change their actual value during a game’s live operations due to in-game inflation and economic adjustments. Forcing us to show the real-money equivalent at all times will quickly become nonsensical.
  2. Multiple Currencies: F2P game systems rely on multiple gameplay loops to be effective. To support these loops and give players meaningful choices, multiple currencies are essential. Without them, balancing becomes hellish, and the player experience suffers—a genuine lose-lose scenario.
  3. Purchase Flexibility: When a game is published, you set specific, pre-defined prices for all in-app purchases on stores like Google Play. Implementing the option to purchase something like “23 gems” would either require rounding that purchase to the nearest predefined value (which violates the rule) or registering a huge number of specific values. That is frankly crazy.

I am genuinely worried that these measures will negatively impact Europe as a total addressable market for F2P games. Knowing the spending habits of superfans, they will simply go elsewhere. And regarding the promised protection for children, let’s be serious: social media is far more dangerous for kids. F2P games require interaction and can develop useful life skills. Infinite-scrolling video feeds are pure fentanyl. The problem isn’t games.