Tag: research

Mobile F2P: How Small Studios Rewrote the Rules

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 22/10/2026

I asked Claude to study 2.5 Gamers, the podcast by Jakob and Matej that dissects a mobile game every week. Here’s the prompt I used:
I want you to browse the most-viewed videos from the past five years, pull the transcripts, and go through the content carefully, word by word. Then write me a breakdown of mobile F2P trends over recent years, with a particular focus on games coming from lesser-known developers.

What makes this podcast compelling is that the main characters are often two-, seven-, twenty-person teams — frequently based in Turkey, Vietnam, China, or some small town in Northern Ireland — pulling in numbers that turn heads.

A note on figures: almost all the revenue numbers I mention are estimates made by Jakob and Matej using market intelligence tools. Treat them as ballpark figures.

2023: the rise of hybrid games

After Apple’s privacy changes, user acquisition costs climbed to the point where the hyper-casual model — masses of downloads at a few cents each, monetised purely through ads — stopped making sense. In early 2024, a Voodoo executive said it plainly: hyper-casual is dead as a business, and their entire prototype pipeline is now aimed at hybrid casual.

Hybrid casual means starting with an ultra-simple hyper-casual core and layering a meta on top of it: currencies, progression, events, battle passes, some in-app purchases.

SayGames set the template with My Perfect Hotel: over a year in soft launch, then 13 million installs in the first month.
Habby did the same with their action RPGs, building a template they reuse from one game to the next.

User acquisition has increasingly spilled over into design, to the point of actually driving it. Whiteout Survival by Century Games, for the first thirty minutes, is indistinguishable from an idle game. Then a “World” button appears and you realise you’ve been playing a 4X all along. They grafted a low-CPI idle game onto a deep strategy title, because idle sells cheaply in ads while the 4X monetises for years. You’re essentially building two games in one.

2024: core mechanics start to matter again

2024 is the year small studios prove that a fresh mechanic is worth more than any amount of market research.

Lessmore is a remote team of 17 people. The prototype for We Are Warriors was built by two people in two weeks, with zero market research: they believed in a moment-to-moment gameplay loop that nobody had done yet. Estimated result: around $200k a day from ads alone, with rewarded ads capped at two per day to stop ads from becoming the main strategy.
Quokka Games, based in Turkey, has about ten people. Screw Jam is a mash-up of three existing games: the nuts and bolts from Nuts & Bolts, the exit limit from Bus Jam, and the bench mechanic from tile-match games. Within four months it goes from zero to roughly $130k a day in in-app purchases.
Hexa Sort, published by Lion Studios, invents a new puzzle mechanic and builds the whole thing around advertising: ten-minute levels, rewarded ads that appear directly on the board when you need space, and an interstitial when you reopen the app.
Offline Games — a collection of solitaire, chess, minesweeper, and clones of well-known games, apparently made by a single person. Zero progression, zero currencies, virtually no ads. By July 2024 it’s hitting one and a half million downloads a day. No paid acquisition campaigns found anywhere: just solid ASO, a YouTube channel with trailers racking up tens of millions of views, and cross-promotion across its own apps. One line from the episode stuck with me: “maybe the answer to monetisation is not having one.”
The WeChat mini-game market has around 400,000 developers, 70% of teams have between 5 and 30 people, and a game takes two or three months to make. China is running one to two years ahead of the West.

2025: execution and speed

By 2025 the mood shifts. The ideas are out there, but the trend is to copy them fast — and in mobile, it looks like the winners are whoever executes that best.

Rollic becomes the master of “deterministic puzzlers” — levels that play out identically every time — and bets on many games doing one or two million a month rather than chasing a single Royal Match.
Block Blast by Hungry Studio, a small Chinese team obsessed with A/B testing, takes Tetris, strips out the time pressure, and turns it into a three-piece puzzle with dynamic difficulty tuned to each player. It becomes the second most downloaded game in the world.
Grand Games, a Turkish studio, takes water sort — a genre packed with low-effort games coasting on ads — and applies the same level of polish as Royal Match: effects, animations, the game immediately telling you when you’re stuck and offering you an extra bottle.
Falcon Games, in Vietnam, copies Royal Match’s events system wholesale and drops it onto a puzzle about sorting objects onto shelves, overtaking the games that had invented the genre.

To me, this is a clear sign of dwindling originality and creative ambition. The sector is increasingly being taken over by a pure-greed mindset.

2026: the sort genre and the 30-day window

By 2026, execution is optimised even further — the winning teams are the ones who move fastest.

Pixel Flow comes out of Loom, a Turkish team of 7–8 people who left Rollic. No investor wanted to back them — according to Akin Babayigit, because they hadn’t come from Peak, the “right” studio. They put in all their own money, ran UA themselves, and went from zero to over a million dollars a day in ninety days. Then Scopely acquired them. A one-to-one Vietnamese clone reached $140k a day within two months, before being pulled from the stores.
Cube Land by RotateLab, a remote Turkish team, arrives after about twenty released games with nothing to show for it. Idea in November, retention test in March, $300k a day six months later. They call it “volume of shots”: keep taking them.
Smash Fest takes its core from a mini-game inside a Toon Blast live event — a cannon shooting balls at physical structures — and turns it into a full game. It scales to 300k downloads a day. Within a month, seven clones drop from established studios. Pixel Flow had three months before being copied; Smash Fest had one. The advice they keep repeating is blunt: you’ve got 30 days to scale.

The creative arms race

If there’s one thread running through all four years, it’s the weight of ad creatives. Since 2023, the volume of videos a game needs to produce has kept growing. Vita Mahjong, a simplified mahjong game aimed at older players, produced 23,000 creatives in a single month. One example cited: 1,800 creatives tested to find one capable of sustaining a million in spend. The takeaway is “whoever executes at volume wins.”

AI has accelerated everything. Some Chinese studios claim to produce 70% of their videos with AI. But the same technology has reached smaller players too: Matej, who’s developing his own game solo, generated ten videos starting from nothing but the store link, in an hour and a half. His conclusion is that ten imperfect videos beat one perfect one.

And there’s a darker side to this, which needs saying. Ads featuring fake neurologists, falsified gameplay, Marvel and Nintendo characters used without permission, families freezing to death to sell a gardening game. The platforms do very little about it. It’s one of the reasons I look at this market with a mixture of admiration and unease.

What I take away from all this

Laid out in order, these three years tell me a few things I want to keep in mind.

The barriers to entry are low; the barriers to excellence are sky-high. Akin says it, and the facts back him up. Anyone can clone Pixel Flow in two weeks. Meowdoku copied an almost note-for-note sudoku that had been sitting on the market for eighteen months going nowhere, and made it explode. Block Out took the same mechanics as Color Block Jam with a completely opposite level design philosophy and surpassed the original. The idea gets you through the door; execution decides who stays.

Specialisation pays off. Loom came from years of deterministic puzzles. Malpa Games spent ten years sharpening their production on word games and sudoku before hunting for new ideas, because “ideas get copied immediately if you’re not precise and fast.” People who know a genre inside out spot where it can be pushed before anyone else does.

Fresh ideas come from outside the genre. A mini-game from a live ops event becomes a full game. A game for older players becomes a monetisation model. Township, after seventeen years, is a match-3 with a tycoon layer in front of it that exists purely to lower the cost of acquisition. “People don’t look outside their own genre,” they say in the Township episode. Those who do find room to move.

Organic reach still exists, but it’s the exception. For most small studios, distribution remains the core problem — and with AI bringing production costs down, it’s only going to become more so.

What reassures me, in all of this, is that the game still matters. Akin says the industry has swung too far towards data, and that today the ad networks’ algorithms raise the quality bar at launch: you can’t ship a half-finished game and test your way to success anymore. You need instinct. You need someone who knows what to keep and what to cut.

And for anyone working in design, that’s good news.

Five Uncomfortable Questions About the Video Game Industry

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 19/10/2026

Over the past few months, the same questions keep coming up. The tone is almost always anxious. I’ve tried to line them up and answer them in my own way.

1. Are we making more games than the market can absorb?

Production capacity is growing, AI promises to push it even further, and yet players still have the same number of hours in the day. The argument seems to hold up.

And yet this past year, with one of the most packed release calendars in recent memory, told a different story. Players have far more time — and far more appetite to spend — than we give them credit for. You don’t need to finish a game to feel good about having bought it. Just look at your own Steam library: mine is full of games I’ve started, dropped, and will get back to eventually. Buying them is already part of the enjoyment.

The market absorbs well-made games just fine. What struggles in a crowded landscape is the mediocre game — the one that in a quieter year might have scraped by, and today disappears within a week. I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: games are a form of art, and the people who play them can tell the difference between something made purely to sell and something made to say something unique.

2. Is this a funding crisis, or are we funding games by rules that no longer apply?

I lean towards the second. The industry has stopped growing at the pace it once did, and the investment models built on those growth curves have aged badly. Anyone pitching a business plan with 2020-style projections will rightly get the “heard it all before” look.

There’s something else that doesn’t get said enough. For years, the assumption was that putting someone from a big AAA studio in charge of a new team was a safe bet. Managing three hundred people inside an existing structure is one job. Building a studio from scratch, on a shoestring, with no safety net, is a completely different one. The string of ventures led by ex-Riot, ex-Blizzard alumni and so on proved that. Many promised a lot and delivered little, and investors haven’t forgotten.

Investors want to see clear distribution strategies that do something a bit different, ideally backed by solid numbers. And if your business isn’t built around growth but around building intellectual property, you’re better off looking at other funding models and saving yourself the headache.

3. If AI makes execution cheaper and faster, what’s left that’s defensible?

I’ll start by questioning the premise, because I’m not convinced. I think AI will make development bigger before it makes it cheaper.

Generating more assets and more code means someone still has to review them, test them, discard them, integrate them. The bottleneck shifts to revision and QA, and that’s where complexity balloons. Once the excitement dies down, we’ll see new specialised roles emerge just to keep all of this running — and the final bill will be higher than it is today. If I could previously develop one mechanic to a certain level, and now I can develop five simultaneously, that also raises the bar for the complexity players expect from us.

So what remains defensible? What’s always been there: the taste of the person who decides what to keep and what to cut, the relationship with your players, the ability to say no. The more material there is on the table, the more valuable the person who knows how to choose.

4. If no one is hiring juniors today, who will the seniors of tomorrow be?

This is the easiest one, which is precisely why it baffles me that people keep asking it. The companies that will still be here tomorrow are the ones investing in their juniors today.

Every single company that stops hiring juniors is making a choice that looks sensible on this year’s spreadsheet. If everyone does it, in five years the senior talent pool will be empty and eye-wateringly expensive. Those who invested in people when it was hard work will have an advantage that money simply can’t buy.

If you’re a junior, don’t lose heart — focus on making things, putting your voice out there, and meeting people. If you’re a founder, think about the future of the industry you live and work in.

5. Are we designing creative risk out of games?

Good design is a balance between what the player expects and a well-placed surprise that catches them off guard in just the right way. Strip out all the risk and you’re left with a game everyone recognises and no one remembers.

It’s natural for large companies to play it safe — they have a lot to lose, shareholders to keep happy, franchises to protect. But that caution leaves an enormous amount of space for anyone who’s small, fast, and willing to try something new. Every time the big players retreat into the safe formula, a door opens for someone else.

It’s worth always keeping the core fantasy of our games front of mind. Push against it with ideas drawn from other media. And be bold enough to bring those ideas in through your own creative lens — players tend to appreciate that far more than we expect.

Junior employees will have things I never had

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 13/10/2026

I remember my first job in video games: a small company in the South of Italy that distributed arcade machines and VLTs. The company had kicked off a project for a Linux-based machine, shipped once to the customer; games were then loaded via an external drive and a decryption smartcard.

My role was to help design and develop those games using a proprietary engine. In practice, I spent most of my time writing Lua. I hadn’t finished university yet, and I was making a lot of mistakes. More than once I put blocking calls inside a loop and the game would freeze. I used global variables where I shouldn’t have, and a change in one place would break something on the completely opposite side of the codebase. As I said, the company was very small, and my boss often caught these things too late, by which point they’d already become a crisis. Which inevitably led to some tense, frantic moments.

It was a tough gig for someone with no experience and no consistent guidance. I know now that the problem wasn’t just me: in a team that small, nobody had time to review my code. Code review was a role that simply didn’t exist. And so, line by line, I was accumulating technical debt without even realising it.

A junior in my position today would have an AI assistant at their side — one that flags, before the code ever reaches the boss, that a particular call is going to block the loop, or that a global variable is going to come back and bite them in a fortnight. Essentially, the review I never had. When I think that juniors in the near future won’t have to run those same risks, I feel genuinely relieved.

Then again, the job of a junior developer or designer has always been the same: instructing a machine to become a game. The language, the syntax, the tricks to stop everything from crashing — those are just the means to an end. If a tool takes care of the means and limits the disasters, the junior has more room for the part that actually matters: figuring out whether the game works and whether it’s fun.

That’s why, when I read that Epic Games wants to develop its Marvel and Star Wars shooter with an “AI-first” approach — code and art generated by AI, with humans directing and overseeing — and when Tim Sweeney talks about a major shift for the whole company, I look at it all with a degree of scepticism. And yet I feel that the underlying intention — setting aside, obviously, the one about cutting costs — is a positive one and could genuinely make things better.

If I were a junior today, I’d use the time AI gives back to me for two things. The first is building connections: getting to know other developers, going to events, getting your face known. The second is developing a real understanding of what players want. Play a lot, but critically — pick a successful game and ask yourself why it works, what need it meets, at what moment it makes you want to play one more round and at what moment it makes you put it down. Someone playing an arcade cabinet wants to feel skilled within a few seconds; someone playing a management sim wants to feel in control. These are questions no AI can ask on your behalf, and that’s where a junior can genuinely make a difference.

The Prototype Without a Team

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 05/10/2026

This past weekend I was completely captivated by the stream of news about video game code decompilations. This came after a week of surprises, in which I discovered I can basically have an idea and see it come to life immediately. On my own, without asking anyone for their time.

Make your own mix

At work I built something that would have been unthinkable three months ago, but for obvious reasons I can’t go into it. In my personal life, I’m studying Catalan and I made a video game for my class, starting from an expression we use a lot: tros de quòniam, which roughly means “a person who’s not the sharpest tool in the shed”. In class we’d done a verb trivia game, so I asked my teacher if I could photograph it. Then, using all the free material available online, ChatGPT helped me structure my own version.

My idea was to keep the dice roll and add objectives to complete — like in mobile puzzle games — which drive much stronger engagement. There are four colours, one for each verb family. Each correct answer is worth ten points multiplied by the dice roll, and filling the bar lets you capture the “trosset” of that colour. Mistakes don’t set you back and there’s no timer, because the goal is to learn.

The start screen of Tros de Tríviam

When I think about it, there isn’t a single new element in this game. The class trivia game, the exercises from official sources, the dice, the progress bars from mobile puzzlers — all of it already existed. The creative work was deciding how to fit the pieces together. You can try it here, if you’re studying Catalan.

A game in progress: the four trossets to capture and the dice roll

What I’m seeing now is that people are using Claude to decompile games and mash them together. In the video below, for instance, someone merged EA’s Skate and Modern Warfare 2: the player can switch to third person, hop on a skateboard, and shoot enemies while doing it.

This is absolutely fascinating, and it breathes new life into the many mechanics that repeat from one game to the next.

I can picture a future where belonging to an ecosystem lets players try out whichever combinations appeal to them. You finish Spider-Man and Wolverine, then use each character in the other’s game. New life for what you’ve already bought. Really exciting stuff.

As a game designer, though, the first thing that springs to mind are the problems. Spider-Man is an acrobatic improviser — he hits and bounces between enemies, and his combat is designed with lots of space and spread-out foes. Wolverine’s combat is far more brutal and visceral, all close-quarters. Put Wolverine in Spider-Man’s New York and you immediately wonder how he moves between skyscrapers without webs. Put Spider-Man into Wolverine’s close-range brawls and his acrobatic rhythm has nowhere to breathe. Every game builds its enemies, levels, and camera around its protagonist’s core verbs. The most interesting mix is the one that forces you to rediscover a game you thought you already knew.

Thoughts on creativity

Some people might raise an eyebrow — fairly enough — at this avalanche of novelty arriving within the space of a few weeks. There are genuine ethical issues tied to all of this. For me, though, creativity somehow exists outside the reach of overly conscious logic and deliberation.

In one respect this situation resembles the question of chasing trends, which I struggled with a great deal working in mobile free-to-play. Chasing trends is a fundamentally anti-creative act. Being aware of trends certainly enriches your knowledge, but creativity is a process of discovery rather than an exact science. Those who chase trends always stay on the too-familiar side of things. A good mix starts from something the player already knows and adds just one surprise: familiar enough to get them in the door, fresh enough to keep them there.

In the same way, having these new tools available unlocks an enormous number of opportunities. Here’s a concrete example: before, to run some experiments and show the team I had a worthwhile idea, I’d have to ask the producers to assign me at least one artist and one programmer. Today I don’t need any of that. I’m not spending anyone else’s time, and that gives me a much wider space to explore. I can make five rough prototypes in an afternoon, throw four of them away, and discover things I didn’t even know I needed to ask.

Impossible to ignore

I use tools that are built on the large-scale appropriation of intellectual property, and that’s simply true. But the benefit from a purely creative standpoint is enormous. There are people more talented than me who could do without them — I can’t, and right now I’m not blocked.

My personal limit is to use them only for prototypes. I’ve written a story, La Principessa Melone, which I hope to publish in Italian in December. I illustrated it first with ChatGPT, and it was precisely those images that helped me understand what I was looking for — which then sent me looking for real artists to actually draw it. The prototype helped me figure out what I wanted, while the book itself will be drawn by human hands.

I don’t know how long this will last: there are various ethical and geopolitical questions that could shut down certain services within hours. So I wouldn’t recommend anyone build their strategy around any of this.

But it’s impossible to deny that we’re looking at a dazzling and in some ways incomprehensible situation, because everything is moving incredibly fast. My practical advice: prototype a lot and quickly, and keep anything that really matters out of a service that could be gone tomorrow.

Two Days, Two AIs, and a Princess Turned into a Melon

La Principessa Melone presentata al regno, illustrazione generata con intelligenza artificiale

Two Days, Two AIs, and a Princess Turned into a Melon

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 21/09/2026

Last week a colleague showed me an interesting video: a game dev getting ChatGPT’s Astra and Claude’s Fable 5.1 to work together inside Unreal Engine, to build a Souls-like boss fight.

The video itself is about game development, but what struck me was seeing two different AIs working on the same material rather than just one. It reminded me of a story I’d had in my head for a while — “Princess Melon”: I’ve been telling it to my daughter Maria Laura at bedtime since she was born, and over the past month I’ve actually sat down and written it up properly in my spare time. So I thought: why not try the same thing myself, with Claude and ChatGPT, but to finally put a face to its characters?

I spent two days getting the two services to talk to each other: one would propose a character, the other would refine or build on it, until we landed on a consistent cast across all the illustrations — from King Ant to the Little Mist, who feeds on the gossip of people who judge without looking. The process helped me understand who these characters really are, and gave me a much clearer picture of the story itself. When I showed Maria Laura the princess and the friends I tell her about every night, her jaw dropped: for the first time she could see them, not just hear about them.

This morning at the gym I was already thinking about the next step: getting in touch with a professional illustrator to give the book a proper, original look — and maybe, who knows, self-publishing my first fairy tale.

There’s a small irony in all of this. “Princess Melon” is about a Little Mist who thrives on “apparently…” and people who laugh before they’ve even bothered to look for themselves. When I read the comments from the usual modern-day luddites, quick to pass judgement on AI instead of actually trying it, I feel like I’ve somehow wandered into my own fairy tale.

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!

The Ocarina is Immortal

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 09/09/2026

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

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

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

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.

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