This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
The post today starts from this article by Seth Godin on disposable software.
Godin’s point is that software, even though it’s invisible, portable, and weightless, used to last. Building something complex took years and thousands of people to maintain it. Even a complex website could be considered a durable technical asset.
Now, with new technologies sitting on anyone’s desk, writing new software is often easier than maintaining the old stuff. We’re in the middle of an explosion of temporary software that will make everything that came before it look small.
Even Apple and Google are significantly increasing app approval times on their stores, because of “vibe coding.”
What endures
There’s one thing, Godin says, that holds up through all of this: the network. When an organisation sits at the centre of a network, it doesn’t matter if a competitor builds something shinier and newer. The network stays right where it is. A living network is worth more today than ever, which is why people keep choosing to stay “here” rather than “go somewhere else.”
The connection to discs
I wrote about Sony stopping physical disc production. Put together, these two pieces make me think about an uncomfortable question: can the future of games be built on disposable games?
With the right tools, a small team today can prototype and test in weeks a game that ten years ago would have taken a full year. I find concepts like this fascinating. If game software becomes throwaway, the relationship with the player risks becoming throwaway too: play, consume, discard, move on to the next thing.
But exactly as Godin says, what endures isn’t the individual product — it’s the network. A publisher that has built a living community, a lore players have grown attached to, maybe an ecosystem of creators and guilds, doesn’t lose ground just because a competitor has shipped a better-looking game. The real competitive advantage, in the games industry as anywhere else, is shifting more and more from the product to the network around it.
Perhaps the right question for anyone designing games today is no longer “how long will this game last?” but “how long will the network of people around it last?”