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Tag: research

Learning to Use Platforms

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 17/08/2026

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

Yesterday I went out for dinner with my family at a restaurant. I asked for details about a dish, the waitress gave them to me, I ordered it. When it arrived, several of the things she’d described were missing. I pointed it out, she went to speak to the chef, who sent back the message: “that’s how the dish comes.”

I’m unlikely to go back. And for a moment I thought about leaving a negative review on Google Maps. I went to look the place up, read through the existing reviews, and found plenty of positive ones and just as many negative — the negative ones almost always about the exact same thing as my experience.

Adding mine would have just been noise on top of noise. And when you think about it, what we’re really doing when we leave a review like that is feeding a platform and potentially damaging someone who, that evening, had simply made a mistake. I let it go. If someone asks me to recommend a restaurant in future, I just won’t mention that one.

What struck me, thinking it over afterwards, was why that dish had bothered me so much. It wasn’t just the missing elements. It was that the explanation I got — “that’s how it comes” — left me with no sense of control: I couldn’t understand what had happened, I couldn’t avoid it next time, the blame sat entirely outside me and was presented as a fixed house rule. If the chef had said “you’re right, we missed that, let me redo it,” I’d probably have left happy anyway. It’s the same mechanism that makes a player get angry — not so much at losing, but at not understanding why they lost and not knowing what to change next time. Negative reviews, whether for restaurants or games, more often come from that kind of frustration than from the difficulty itself.

And players leave reviews on platforms far more often than a customer leaves a review for a local restaurant. That review, on Steam, has a direct impact on a game’s sales. It’s why platforms in my industry have overtaken even personal recommendations: your opinion, if you write it there, carries real weight (unlike with neighbourhood restaurants, thank goodness).

How do you survive in this kind of situation?

I was watching an interview with a designer who says he doesn’t play other games during development, so as not to be influenced. The interviewer points out that Shigeru Miyamoto has said similar things on several occasions — arriving at his own solutions rather than retracing what already exists.

I work in exactly the opposite way, probably because I don’t make my own games but work for third parties (clients and GSC Game World, at the time of writing). When I start a new design I always look for the unique and distinctive elements by starting from what the competition is already doing. Pareto’s rule applies: 80% familiar territory, 20% novelty. To put it into practice I use a few platforms:

  • I use Gemini and Claude for research
  • I use Steam to study competitors’ capsules and descriptions, and to read reviews
  • I use YouTube as a kind of quick playtesting proxy

A concrete example: if I’m working on a progression system, I’ll first go to Steam and read what players love or hate about similar systems that are already out there (that’s my 80% — what the audience already expects and recognises). Then I look at where all the competitors start to look too much alike, because that’s where there’s room for the 20% of novelty that makes a game stand out without scaring off the people who try it.

It also depends on the kind of work I do: I can’t play the “misunderstood genius” when I’m working for a client — I need to meet their requirements as professionally as possible. But I don’t experience that as a creative compromise. Looking first at what already exists and figuring out what I can adapt, recombine or recalibrate is a genuine working method, not an imposed constraint: more often than not, the smartest move isn’t to invent from scratch, but to find the right lever in what already works.

Platforms, in this sense, help me enormously — speeding up tasks and bringing solid data to help me align with the client. The very same platforms that now dominate the games industry are the ones that provide the most valuable tools for improving what I do. On the other side, though, the most skilled creators use them differently, and go out of their way not to let them have a hold over the creative process when it really matters.

Maybe the answer isn’t to pick one approach over the other, but to know when to use each. Platforms as a research tool when I’m working for someone else and need to understand what the market expects. Silence when I’m working on something of my own and want it to come from an idea, not from a comparison. And in both cases, the lesson from the restaurant stays the same: whether you’re reading reviews or designing a system that will generate them, the right question isn’t “how harsh is the verdict” — it’s “does the player understand why it happened, and do they feel like they can do something about it next time.”

What Became of the Old Values?

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 13/08/2026

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

La crisi che stiamo vivendo nel settore dei videogiochi deriva principalmente dal fatto che il potere si è spostato dai publisher alle piattaforme. Una delle piattaforme contemporanee più rilevanti è Roblox.

Anche se il suo modello di business è discutibile, il 50% dei bambini americani apre Roblox nel corso della settimana. La piattaforma è estremamente accessibile e presente su molteplici dispositivi. Il che mi riporta, a mio avviso, a un momento simile all’inizio degli anni ’90, quando la gente iniziava a chiedersi cosa fosse davvero un videogioco — il momento in cui nacquero Baldur’s Gate e titoli simili, per capirci.

Lo dico sempre ai miei colleghi e clienti: se il tuo gioco esce tra sette anni, il pubblico a cui ti rivolgi in questo momento sta probabilmente giocando su Roblox, Minecraft e Fortnite. Fare previsioni è impossibile, perché i videogiochi toccano corde molto personali e le tendenze vanno e vengono. Un gioco in stile anni ’90 potrebbe tornare di moda nel 2030 — non lo sappiamo.

Eppure noto una tendenza a voler ignorare queste mode, in gran parte perché non corrispondono a quella che consideriamo la nostra idea di come dovrebbe essere un videogioco. Siamo cresciuti con certi valori, quei valori vengono oggi messi seriamente in discussione, e questo porta inevitabilmente a degli attriti. È del tutto umano cercare di evitarli con qualche scusa, perché fare i conti con ostacoli reali fa anche male.

Quindi, per quanto sia vero che Roblox ha permesso la diffusione di un gioco in cui era possibile pagare per derubare bambini dei loro personaggi virtuali e umiliarli, è altrettanto vero che moltissime persone scelgono quella come forma di intrattenimento. La formula del successo, secondo me, sta nel trovare il modo di far convivere i nostri ideali con queste nuove tendenze.

Reflections on Mobile and Premium

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 12/08/2026

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

In 2022 I decided to try switching careers, from mobile to PC/console games. You know the ones — in crisis, not growing, running on increasingly expensive hardware, built by hundreds of well-paid people over seven years on unsustainable business models? Yeah, those. Well, not exactly those — I’m being ironic… but you get the idea.

I actually managed it this year. In March I joined the ranks of GSC Game World, the creators of the legendary S.T.A.L.K.E.R., thanks to a recommendation. “We need people like you,” my friend Adrian told me in August 2025, and seven months later I was in. After years of a career in mobile and now moving to PC and console games, I’m realising just how much I still have to learn about game design. The shift in mindset is sharp.

Mobile and premium

In mobile, speed and execution efficiency are everything, because the business runs fundamentally on performance marketing. Companies pay to acquire users (when a game is free, your time becomes the currency), so the whole game is about retaining them and nudging them towards small payments to keep them hooked.

Premium titles are a completely different story:

  1. First of all, there’s a direction to discover — somehow — together with your team. It’s about creating a memorable experience, built on a fantasy that taps into something players genuinely desire. You can’t run quick experiments the way you do in mobile; instead, you have to think carefully through all the possibilities a feature opens up.
  2. Games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. already have their audience, a good chunk of whom are very vocal online. The ability to listen to all those voices and turn feedback into concrete design decisions becomes essential. In mobile, it’s more about making changes and watching behavioural data, since the players who spend the most and keep the business afloat — the so-called whales — tend to be pretty quiet.
  3. Everyone has their passion, their ego, and their experience, so working on premium game design means finding the meeting point between personal creative vision, business sustainability, and technical feasibility with the developers. A decision made today could have ripple effects five to seven months down the line. Very different from mobile, where you can iterate much faster and where personal creative vision only goes so far (see: dark patterns that nobody actually likes, but that we all end up using anyway because there’s no real alternative).

Technology and AI

Lately a lot of players have been emerging promising to speed up content production, and the most popular technology is obviously artificial intelligence. However, the critical judgement, vision, and systemic sensitivity needed to build this kind of product make these tools less useful than you’d think. You need to think very strategically, and you also need leadership skills to navigate the different habits and personalities within a team. No algorithm helps you with that. You’re far better off picking up a hobby, exercising, reading history and philosophy to understand what makes people tick.

I’m happy, and that’s what matters. My little business isn’t in crisis, I’m also building an indie game, and I’m in a very creative phase of my life. Most importantly, I’m getting my hands on things that are real — things that actually matter.

Things We Cannot Control

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 11/08/2026

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

Watch this:

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

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

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

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

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

Equal Rules, Opposite Reasons

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 04/08/2026

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 first report on ad-based monetisation in mobile gaming. I read it in detail (summary article on Deconstructor of Fun). The figure that caught my eye: hybrid games that put in-app purchases first (IAP-first) earn roughly four times as much as those that put advertising first (IAA-first). Purely ad-based games can still reach nine-figure numbers, but they’re the exception, not the rule.

The report leaves one question open: in ad-based games, free rewards earned through ads compete directly with paid rewards from the store. Solving this cannibalisation is, according to the author, the opportunity still left on the table.

The playbook of someone who’s been building economies for 40 years

These reflections on the report reminded me of a talk by Teut Weidemann, recorded at Digital Dragons.

Mr Weidemann argues that a well-designed game economy is the real source of stable revenue — not flash offers or battle passes. And in making that case, without ever mentioning “ethics” or “player trust”, he lays out a set of rules that are, in practice, anti-manipulation (which brings me back to my own post from yesterday):

  • Avoid discounts on premium currency, otherwise you destroy the price anchor and players just wait for a sale instead of buying;
  • don’t do per-user dynamic pricing. Weidemann cites the Zynga case, which ended badly when players compared notes and discovered different prices for the same item;
  • always leave at least one resource that even the wealthiest whale can’t buy. Even players who pay for everything still need to work for something, otherwise they finish the game in a week and walk away bored;
  • don’t tie virtual items to a subscription: a portion of free-to-play players are happy to buy a premium account (more comfort, less grind) but consider buying an item “cheating” — so keep the two things separate.

The tension

Weidemann’s rules look a lot like the ones from Self-Determination Theory that I wrote about yesterday: respect player autonomy, don’t break trust, don’t treat players differently from one another without good reason. His stated motivation is: if you break the price anchor you lose revenue, if the whale has nothing left to work towards they leave, if players find out you’re treating them differently they’ll tear you apart in the reviews. It’s risk management, more than ethics. And as far as I’m concerned, that makes it even more compelling than my own thoughts from yesterday — especially when you’re talking business with people who only speak that language.

Which brings me to the question I find most interesting from a game design perspective: does motivation matter, if the outcome for the player is the same? Mr Weidemann proposes optimising for a long-term function, and that happens to coincide with respecting the player. Now I’m left wondering: maybe in the long run, serving players and exploiting them converge on the same rules — and what diverges are only the economies that are thinking short-term.

Serve, Don’t Manipulate

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 03/08/2026

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

Andrew Kelley, the creator of the Zig programming language, opened a talk with an uncomfortable question: who does the software we write actually serve? The talk is called “Don’t Take the Black Pill” and it was made for an audience of developers, not game designers. But it’s exactly the question we should be asking ourselves every time we design a progression system.

A more honest measure than “fun”

Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory says that a person is doing well — in a game as in life — when three needs are being met: autonomy (my choices matter), competence (I’m improving, and I can see it), and relatedness (I’m not alone). A system can have spotless retention metrics and still deny all three. There’s a name for that too: coercive retention. The progression is there, but the player comes back because a timer is expiring or a notification dragged them back in, not because they actually wanted to.

Coercionware, outside games too

Kelley calls this category “coercionware”: software whose purpose isn’t to serve the people using it, but to manipulate them. The examples he gives don’t come from games — unsolicited push notifications, A/B tests optimising for the click rather than the experience, recommendation algorithms chasing engagement instead of value. What struck me is that he frames all of this as a design choice, not a side effect. Someone, in a meeting, decided this was fine.

The same problem, different name

In games we call it other things: gacha, limited-time events, season passes that pile on the pressure. But it’s the same mechanism: autonomy is taken away to guarantee a return. I wrote about this last week when talking about dopamine and oxytocin — the relatedness in Self-Determination Theory is, at the end of the day, the same conversation as oxytocin. A player who comes back to spend time in a world or with other people doesn’t need to be held in place by a timer.

A useful habit

There’s a simple habit I use when evaluating a new feature: play devil’s advocate with myself. Assume it fails, and ask why. The list of reasons usually includes things like “it confuses the player” or “it doesn’t convert well enough.” It’s worth adding one more: it fails because it manipulates instead of serves. That question doesn’t come up on its own in a roadmap meeting. You have to ask it deliberately, before you ship.

The next time a feature improves the numbers, the right question isn’t whether it works. It’s whether the player chose it — or got caught in it.

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.

Changing Your Mindset Isn’t Enough

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 17/07/2026

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

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.

  1. Hire real leaders
  2. Find the vision
  3. Don’t scale too soon
  4. 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.

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