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.