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The Business I Chose

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 16/09/2026

Yesterday I watched this interview with the CEO of Bulkhead, the studio behind Wardogs, an online multiplayer first-person shooter.

I knew the reaction would come instantly, and that this person’s words were perfect fodder for easy clicks and LinkedIn hot takes against crunch.

Today, a writer friend sends me this piece by another writer.

The business I chose

Nobody forced me into game development. My real passion is thinking about what kind of experience to bring to the medium. The part I enjoy most is discovering new cultures and finding brilliant people to talk and argue with about creative things. My dream is to put my name on a few games that actually leave a mark.

I don’t make games to get rich, and I don’t make them alone — though I had to try it on my own to figure that out. I make games because that’s the choice I made, pure love for it, if you like. Since I spend most of my waking hours at work, it matters to me to try and build something genuinely grand, rather than just tend a small, tidy little patch.

And when I work for others, I always look for projects that excite me. I don’t work just to pay the bills — I try to work on things I actually care about. And that sometimes comes at a cost: a mind that never quite switches off, extra hours, time taken away from my family.

The same was true for the family I grew up in. My mother, a paediatrician, worked far more hours than she was ever required to. My father, a lawyer, would pull all-nighters to draft briefs. My brother is a judge and he too has to do gruelling shifts with no extra pay. My family taught me that crunch doesn’t really exist as a concept — there are just things that need doing, and those things take time.

Recently I chose to move from mobile free-to-play to PC and console games, and that comes with a serious amount of extra hours. This is what I chose, and I know the consequences. We talk about our rights an awful lot, and about our responsibilities hardly at all.

The Pleasure of Walking

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 15/09/2026

Lately it feels like mistakes aren’t just piling up — they’re compounding exponentially. New technologies let us get from point A to point B sometimes almost instantly. But that very thing makes us miss out on opportunities that could turn out to be essential.

Imagine that this weekend you decide to visit a museum in your city. Imagine you have a helicopter at your disposal that picks you up from home and takes you straight there. A helicopter ride is fun (I assume — I’ve never been on one), so let’s say the price you pay is falling asleep for the journey. The upside is that you arrive at your destination immediately. But you lose everything else along the way: if you’d walked, you might have bumped into an old friend en route. Or, who knows, stumbled across a café doing a great breakfast. Or spotted a sign announcing the opening of another cultural centre and decided to head there instead. Sure, walking is more tiring, and slower — but it’s full of possibilities.

Right, well — in game design today you can generate a feature spec almost instantly. Your boss tells you to work on a feature, gives you a week, and within two hours you’ve already got a solid base to work from. All thanks to algorithms built essentially on probability, running on enormously powerful hardware, capable of producing structured, reasonably coherent documentation in next to no time. Far less time than you or I would need, that’s for sure.

The problem is what gets lost along the way: the chance to discover other things, to pick up new ideas and angles. But your boss gave you a week and you’re delivering in two days, so your OKR is probably going to look great — even if what you’re not doing is actually discovering anything new.

So where does that leave us? My own preference is pretty clear. For me, a true professional needs to take the time to do things properly — creativity needs constraints, yes, but it also needs time.

How to Stand Out Online

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 14/09/2026

There’s a worrying trend that has quite literally exploded over the past few months, at least in my social feeds: posting drafts and half-finished work.

I see established professionals posting rough gameplay examples, presumably to catch the eye of a potential client or employer. I see junior people posting screenshots from 3D authoring tools or game engines, probably to demonstrate their skills.

Noise. Nothing but noise.

I understand the anxiety around wanting to carve out a place in the industry, and I’m all for the drive to get things done — but the problem is what we’re actually showing.

If your goal is to develop your indie game, think about serving an audience rather than collecting reactions on LinkedIn
If you’re looking for a job, nobody’s going to hire you just because you can open a piece of software.

The reality of the industry

I was reading yesterday this very interesting post by an industry leader — one of the most clear-eyed takes I’ve seen in months. The reality is that we’re in a moment of consolidation (not a crash, as some people like to say), where the investor narrative can’t promise growth anymore. There’s an enormous amount of talent out there looking for work right now, which makes it genuinely hard to stand out.

This naturally leads people to think that standing out and differentiating yourself is what matters. And in a way, that’s true — but I don’t think speed is the key factor here. Posting half-finished work does get your voice out there sooner, yes. But it also shows your scrappy, unpolished side.

So how do you actually stand out?

I don’t have a magic formula, but I’ve been in the industry for years and built my own position from scratch, so I do know a thing or two. The most important thing is the relationships you build with other people — anything you can do to build them better is worth doing.

If you’re an indie developer looking to get visibility for your project, you need to do everything you can to connect with your early adopters as soon as possible. Find out where they are, talk to them, genuinely try to understand how they play, what they buy and why. If you’re putting together a video to grab attention, do it with the right level of polish.

If you’re a professional without much experience, rather than showing things that frankly anyone can do (look, here’s my axe on ArtStation!), put in the work to figure out what makes you unique, and show that in the best way you can. Nobody cares about the how — they care about the end result and why you believe it’s strong.

If you’re an experienced professional, there’s no point showing off that you built a new prototype in a few minutes. Instead, focus on helping people understand why working with you is a good idea. Nurture the relationships you already have, teach what you genuinely know — videos work well for this. Help people see that you’ve learned to think deeply about certain things.

Less slop, less spam, and more real connections and genuine knowledge-sharing!

Eagles Dressed as Pigeons

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 19/08/2026

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

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.

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?”

The Secret Is Making Them Feel Smart

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 09/07/2026

Many game designers start from a flawed assumption: they think the player needs to be skilled, attentive, strategic in order to enjoy the game. They build systems that only reward people who read tooltips, calculate probabilities, and optimise resources.

The reality is that most people don’t do any of that. And the real craft of design is making the player feel like they made a smart choice — even when the system quietly steered them there all along.

Building the feeling

A good combat encounter doesn’t ask the player to figure out the winning move from scratch. It puts options in front of them, makes one of them slightly more readable, and lets them get there “on their own”.

The same logic applies to puzzles: the solution feels like a personal insight, but the game has already silently ruled out ten red herrings before the player ever considered them.

Attribution matters more than difficulty

When a player wins and feels like the credit is theirs, they come back. The right question during design is: what can I remove, simplify, or surface, so that their conclusion lands easily and still feels like their own?

A designer’s skill is measured by how much invisible work they can do to make the player feel a certain way.

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.

The Focus is Saying No

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 29/06/2026

The most common problem I see with my clients is that they often know too much. They listen to podcasts and take online courses, study competitors, gather feedback, analyse trends… and then they freeze.

Steve Jobs, in a famous 1997 interview, said that focus doesn’t mean saying yes to the most important things. It means saying no to hundreds of good ideas. Too much information can push you towards choices that are right, but not yours.

How I analyse the competition

When I analyse competitors for a client, I work in two columns:

What interests me about this competitor? What are they doing that points in an interesting direction: vision, audience, priorities — in that order.
What doesn’t interest me, and why? What are they doing that works, that the market accepts, that isn’t a mistake — but that simply isn’t right for me. Not for the audience I’m serving, not for the identity of the product I’m building.

It’s important to tell the difference between things that are too vague and things you can actually act on:

“We want to make something accessible” is vague.
“We will never build a system that requires an external guide to understand” is concrete, operational, and defensible.

The one thing to cut

In game design I often use a simple mental tool: find the one thing to cut. Almost always, it’s a good idea that someone has grown attached to. It’s not wrong in itself — it’s just wrong for this product, or at this moment.

The same logic applies to a strategy, a piece of communication, a roadmap.

Saying no to a good idea is the hardest part of the job. It requires knowing precisely what you’re trying to be, not just what you’d like to do.

And that clarity comes from deciding what to leave out.

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