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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
A few days ago I came across a video on the Modern Classic channel about what’s been happening in the games industry lately. Physical discs disappearing, film licences being pulled from people’s accounts, sudden restructurings at major publishers.
But the part that really got me was the way it reconstructs how we ended up here — specifically the section about the Dreamcast.
The business model the Dreamcast took to its grave
For the first twenty years of gaming, a console was the vehicle for the games of whoever built it. You bought an Atari to play Atari games, an Intellivision for Mattel games, a Super Nintendo for Mario and Zelda, a Genesis for Sonic. Third parties existed, but were sometimes seen as almost diluting the identity of the machine.
Then Sony arrived with the PlayStation, and from that point the console became a generic platform — the business was in royalties from third parties, and whoever had the most volume won.
The Dreamcast was the last system built seriously around the old model, grounded in a powerful arcade identity and a massive first-party catalogue. At the time it looked like a system that couldn’t lose.
And yet Sony simply squeezed Sega out of the hardware business through sheer size. Which is exactly why the Dreamcast’s failure still stings today: it’s the symbolic end of the idea that a console should have an identity, a personality, a reason to exist beyond “taking a cut of every sale”. From that point on, the video argues, everything drifted towards the bean counters — live service, monetising the same game indefinitely instead of making a great one and selling it.
Denshattack: that spirit isn’t entirely dead
The day after watching that video I bought Denshattack!, which came out on 15 July. The premise, in a single line, is gloriously absurd: it’s an action-platformer where you pilot an anti-gravity train that does tricks and grinds on rails like Tony Hawk, inside a wildly colourful Japanese fantasy, all in service of dismantling a corrupt corporation. “Tony Hawk, but your skateboard is a train.”
A small studio (Undercoders) believed in that idea, built a strong and instantly recognisable art direction around it, and made something designed simply to be played and to be fun from the very first minute.
Denshattack gave me the same physical feeling I had as a kid turning on the Dreamcast: an idea that exists because someone wanted it to exist, not because the market asked for it. Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Space Channel 5, Rez — these came from people who had a clear vision in their heads and an equally clear aesthetic, and pushed them out whole, without sanding down the edges.
An interesting case study
Two tools I often use when analysing a concept turn out to be directly relevant to this Dreamcast/Denshattack comparison.
The first is what I call fantasy extraction: before you even look at the systems, ask yourself who the player becomes and what they should feel in the best moments. “You’re a train grinding rails to take down a corporation” is a fantasy you can’t mistake for anything else — exactly the same kind of clarity the Sega mascots of the Dreamcast era had.
The second is the novelty spectrum audit: every original concept sits somewhere between too familiar and too new, and the trick isn’t to maximise novelty for its own sake, but to understand what kind of innovation you’re actually doing. Denshattack recombines trick-based skating physics with a subject — the train, the dystopia — that nobody had ever thought to pair with it. It’s innovation by recombination: familiar enough to read in three seconds of trailer, strange enough to stick in your head.
“We’ve lost the reason consoles exist,” the video said in its conclusion. It leaves me with a very concrete urge to keep designing things with a sharp fantasy and genuine novelty, rather than filing them down until nobody finds them offensive. I hope Denshattack turns out to be proof that audiences reward that kind of thinking.
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?”
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
Yesterday, two pieces of news dropped almost simultaneously. The first: WARN filings confirmed that the layoffs are hitting real studios — ZeniMax Online Studios (The Elder Scrolls Online) and Id Software (Doom), entire technical departments wiped out.
Cutting jobs on one side, being called in to advise the government on how to protect them on the other. A system working exactly as designed.
To understand why carrying out mass redundancies aligns with — rather than conflicts with — institutional recognition in corporate and financial circles, three structural factors are worth unpacking.
1. How productivity gets defined
In macroeconomic models, productivity is calculated as output per unit of labour. When leadership reduces headcount while using automation to maintain the same output, financial and regulatory institutions see a successful operational optimisation.
2. The AI integration mandate
Boards and central banks prioritise leaders with a background like Ms. Sharma’s. The primary goal is to understand how emerging general-purpose technologies can compress linear production costs and reshape future labour allocation as an asset.
Someone who has already demonstrated they can do it in-house — cutting thousands of positions while promising significantly higher output — is exactly the profile you want at a table tasked with writing the rules for everyone else.
3. The asymmetry of risk and accountability
Game developers carry product-specific risk: if the game doesn’t land, the team feels it directly and immediately.
Executives, by contrast, manage systemic risk, spread across entire portfolios and over years. In capital markets, executing mass layoffs to protect margins is codified as standard fiduciary responsibility — and that strengthens an executive’s profile for institutional and advisory roles.
The people at ZeniMax Online and Id Software spent years — in some cases over a decade — building the output that is now being measured as recovered productivity.
What remains
This divergence points to a precise structural reality: the metrics that financial systems use to reward executive performance operate in complete independence from the long-term retention of creative and technical talent, and from the moral obligations of any company.
I want to close with a line from the late Adriano Olivetti, a great Italian industrialist: “A factory cannot look only at the profit index. It must distribute wealth, culture, services, democracy. I think of the factory for the person, not the person for the factory.”
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking “Accept”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously.
Cookie
Duration
Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional
11 months
The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy
11 months
The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.
Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.
Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.