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Category: Business

My take on Supercell’s CEO last post

Published by Paolo on 17/02/2025

Last week I read interesting thoughts about the latest message released by Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen. This is an annual event that always attracts a lot of attention. It is interesting to watch how the experts’ thinking and the media attention evolve.

Supercell proves to be a company that is as ethical as Nintendo and others. They are the good people in our industry and they should always be respected for this reason alone. I have never worked with them, so I don’t know how they work internally. But the fact that they promote certain values ​​and ways of communicating is enough for me to keep them in my heart.

Every expert has denounced the lack of information this time, and this year I also felt a great lack. The challenges described are due to the fact that the power has shifted from publishers to platforms. Everything else for me is a consequence of this. Especially in the case of companies like Supercell that do their job well.

What I don’t understand is why in 2025 I still can’t play Brawl Stars on my PS5 and my home PC. Why can’t I download it from Steam and the Microsoft Store?

Supercell is leaving money on the table in this sense.

On setting the right expectations

Published by Paolo on 24/01/2025

Yesterday I was arguing with a LinkedIn influencer about the expectations that EA had on Dragon Age: The Veilguard. His point was that the game had 1.5M players instead than 3M expected by EA. So the game was lacking appeal for the players.

My point, instead, was that a game that reaches that impressive number (in only 2 months) is definitely an appealing game. Then the game can be good or bad. But for sure it has appeal. The expectations set up by EA execs, instead, were out of reality. The error was theirs, not developers mistake.

He told me that the budget invested in marketing was enormous (no data added) so that the game should have had more players. Plus, the fact of having players doesn’t mean that every player bought the game. That is true, but today if someone decides to invest part of their free time in your game is a miracle. Today we have lots of distractions, it’s hard to reach Elden Ring’s numbers, just to make an example.

The problem is that today we are still setting expectations too high in a landscape with serious distribution and attention challenges. I haven’t played Dragon Age. The Veilguard (I have no time), and I read many different opinions on it. The game is a good game, and it’s appealing. But it was a deception for EA, because of their expectations on it. Those are hard times for forecasters.

Grow your hirings

Published by Paolo on 23/01/2025

Every project has a level of learning and skill building for a game designer. It’s very important for a team to be able to guarantee a space for your members to learn. It’s way more optimal to grow your designer than to hire someone already expert, to me.

I say this because the history of games backes my theory. The strongest IPs in the world have been built by people who became experts while they were building.

Many veterans ex-Riot, ex-Blizzard, founded their own independent studios got funded, but they are not delivering too much. Being an expert in something specific brings lots of bias on the table too.

It’s cheaper and safer to grow your people.

State of Videogames 2025

Published by Paolo on 15/01/2025

As every year, Mr. Matthew Ball dropped a set of slides containing his takes on the state of the games industry. You can read it here in multiple formats.

To me it’s interesting to read these documents mainly to understand the mentality of business people. But those charts and sentences are fundamentally biased towards the macro. The rational side of the business of making games, the statistics. They ignore most of the other part, which exists and it’s equally important. The intuitive side of games, the art. The “we make this game because we believe that we need to say these things”. That is also what makes games so great.

Also, I do not agree with his call for growth. He says that videogames overgrew the countries GDP and then he says that the industry should grow further? I don’t think so. The industry should become more realist, instead.

Good news for the ecosystem

Published by Paolo on 08/01/2025

Today’s news is that ex-Annapurna staff is acquiring the Private Division team. This means that Annapurna Interactive (the official one) will continue make “transmedia” things with contractors. Meanwhile, Take Two interactive will focus on live service PC and mobile games.

Win win for everyone. I hope this newly formed team do great things. Especially, I wish they start from small things. I have said this many times, I will repeat it: to me the games industry is like a forest.

And a forest to be healthy needs not only big trees. It needs also the underwood, the little mushrooms. The ants working everyday, the snakes representing a danger. Over the last 5-10 years the expectations from investments and media were just looking at the big trees like Roblox and Fortnite. But for Roblox and Epic to survive, a healthy ecosystem needs also small games. AA games, indie games, instant games. Small games.

Entire Steam catalog scraped!

Published by Paolo on 11/12/2024

A random guy on the Internet used many APIs and web spiders to scrap interesting data. The result is here:

It confirmed something I had been suspecting for weeks. In fact, I cannot say too much but I am working with a client from Singapore on a game that will be published on Steam. The money is moving towards indie and premium, people are running away from free-to-play. At least people that contact me, small and mid companies.

The difference is that in indie you look for originality. You look for an empty space to fill, something new. Indie gamers are people looking for novelty. They like certain mechanics and flows, as everybody. But they want to see interesting mixes of genres.

F2P developers, instead, look for different things. A F2P game starts always from a clone. Then you try to make the +1 innovation, which generally speaking is an improvements towards live operations, that are:

  • Events and offers
  • Tutorials and quality improvements
  • Adjusts to players’ progression
  • New features

The goal of this is to improve the ROAS (return on advertisement spending). You spend money to bring people in with ads, and you get money from this people, eventually.

Two completely different world, very interesting both!

Do not get fooled

Published by Paolo on 29/11/2024

In recent years I have become an avid listener of content disseminated by experts on the video game business. The tendency is to take the few extreme successes and start breaking them down using visuals with curves and Venn diagrams.

Thanks to this content I have learned to interface with the business side, to better communicate my opinions and design solutions. I am immensely grateful to be able to live in the age where all this information is free.

However, I want to insist on one point: a video game is a fundamentally aesthetic experience. Aesthetics means many things, in ancient Greece aesthetics was the science that studied the essence of things. Video games touch fibers that are difficult to explain with charts.

We are approaching the time in the year in which all the experts will make their predictions, stating them with conviction and using swear words to underline the importance of what they say. Inevitably, this will affect some investments and opportunities. As always, those will not become reality, but then the marketer is always capable of changing the semantics.

I just want to say that it can be difficult to see the reality amidst so much noise, do not be fooled.

Find a way to talk

Published by Paolo on 25/11/2024

Years ago a politician spoke from a pulpit and people listened to him. Today there is a dialogue, real or virtual, with people. Otherwise, the politician has difficulty winning.

Years ago television told stories and people watched dancers and presenters from home. Today we see more dialogues and artists who train to become professionals.

Years ago the blog trend exploded on the Internet. People wrote and whoever wanted to read and commented. Today, various types of social media are used to connect with readers and dialogue. Substack works very well.

Years ago a company created a video game and put it on the shelves. People bought it and finished it. Today a company makes a video game and establishes a dialogue with the players. The video game is constantly updated.

The key to the intricate problem of distribution is to ease communication. Even while the game is being developed. Test the product with performance marketing, but open opportunities for dialogue, too.

Distribution is challenging

Published by Paolo on 20/11/2024

Consumption habits have changed a lot in the last few years. Nowadays that is a significant number of people that buy a console to play a single game. Usually, that game is Fortnite.

Games are not underground like before, now they are mainstream. This brings a lot of challenges to distribution. They are cool, they are the normal thing one does. Before it wasn’t like that.

How to face this challenge? Phil Spencer said “less Excel” yesterday, and maybe he is right. It’s not about using a budget to push the thing out, but more about trying to have a conversation with the right crowd.

Why not “best DLC”?

Published by Paolo on 19/11/2024

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree DLC is a candidate for “best game of the year” at The Game Awards. But it’s not a game, is it?

It would be wonderful if these events kept up with the times. We are clearly in the era of games no longer as artifacts but as entertainment. Living games, updated to keep the public’s attention for many months.

It is absurd to reward only the new, when an update or a DLC, as is the case of Elden Ring, receives so much admiration from the public. The Game Awards should start considering awards such as “Best DLC”, “best live event”, etc. The market moves on completely different perspectives than 10 years ago when these awards were created.