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Category: Business

My takes on The Game Awards

Published by Paolo on 12/12/2025

Today my post came later because I wanted to watch the whole show of The Game Awards, so I took my time. I loved the show, in my opinion it is getting better and better. I liked it better than last year, because I found the new teasers less like a Tool video and with more hope.

The first take is that it is a great time for independent developers. The creative director of Sandfall told that he is thankful for youtubers for putting out tutorials because he had no idea on how to make a game. And the game he made with the team was the most appreciated in the history of TGA, so yeah… I guess it’s easier to make games nowadays. The important part is the creativity, now more than ever. And I believe that now it’s a moment where we can, and should, risk a little bit more in that sense. Avoid repeating formulas, find new recipes. Now the tech permit beat everybody else with less than $10M.

Another trend I am noticing is that horror and monsters is casualizing. Monsters are getting cool, I saw zombies dressed like rappers and cool things like that. Sci-fi, instead, is animalizing always more, with bears and dogs in tech armor. These are two new trends that have been started years ago (in my opinion, from Twilight and Guardians of the Galaxy, respectively) but that now are exploding.

During my view of the show there were tears in my eye. First reason is because the show is fantastic if you love videogames. There is music and stunning visuals, incredible people coming on the show. There is everything I love. But I cried also for a little bit of nostalgia/sadness: it’s because it’s very hard to participate into something like the games presented there. Most of the work in games is on very poor experiences, so I feel that maybe I am losing my time. Maybe I do need to really care about my own world, things I want to put out there, and leave the chase of the next client. I have to think about that.

Let’s talk about Horses

Published by Paolo on 07/12/2025

The new game from Santa Ragione, Horses, has been banned from the main stores: Steam and Epic, at the moment I write this post. Humble just enabled the game again in their list, they delisted for a while.

I watched a gameplay and Horses is a game about cruelty. The experience is about helping a dark organization in torturing and abuse people. It is pornographic, as well. That’s why it was censored from the two main PC stores out there.

There is a lot of discussion online regarding censorship, capitalism, politics, and it’s not just something coming from young players. It comes from developers as well, and that shows the ingenuity (to say the least) of certain professionals. In fact, Steam warned the company Santa Ragione 2 years ago about the impossibility of publishing this game. They decided to go on and Steam maintained its promise. It is what it is.

I believe Santa Ragione was coherent in their choice to continue develop the game, but I also believe that putting your whole business at risk for a principle is not a good choice. I cannot manage to feel admiration for them, also if I empathize because I know they want to tell a unique story. And I saw that they did manage to deliver something unique. Lots of game design issues (in my humble opinion) but a clearly identifiable game with a unique voice. Let’s hope they manage to continue with their business, as they deserve. But they made a mistake.

Interesting interview to mr. Owen Mahoney

Published by Paolo on 03/12/2025

Mr. Owen Mahoney is one of the few outspoken gaming CEOs out there that speaks actual game development language. I listened to this interview and one thing has made me think a lot, also because it’s not well explained.

Mr. Mahoney talks about the importance of looking at the future intentions of a team or company to understand its shape. He makes the specific example of the founder of Embark, who wanted to make something new, something different. But that’s always the case whenever there is a sales opportunity. We do want to show what we did, our experience, but we also want to say, “Hey, we are building the future here; do not miss the opportunity to go with us towards it.”

How can we really understand when we are in front of a good company? Now I want to switch my discourse from the perspective of an employee or a consultant. How to understand that the client or employer we have in front of us is the right bet for our next 2-5 years? That’s a matter of gut feeling, but is there a way to make a sort of due diligence? That’s what I would like to ask Mr. Mahoney.

Roblox: unprofitably unsafe

Published by Paolo on 27/11/2025

The CEO of Roblox gave an interview to one of the most popular NYTimes podcasts and the industry didn’t reacted well. I found it insightful and I tend not to judge people, especially salesmen, when they are selling something.

The issue with Roblox stands in its business model. Everybody knows that when a service is for free, the product is you. And in Roblox, the product are the kids. If they would really fix the issue with kids safety, they should start from there. They should put on a subscription model, where 100% of kids (or better, their parents) will pay a fixed amount just to play. In that way, things would change a lot.

And maybe, who knows, Roblox would also become a profitable business. Because since day 1, it has never been profitable. Roblox relies on investors who believe that, at some point, all those users will eventually generate profits. But for now, it’s a leaking bucket.

Be honest, be indie

Published by Paolo on 23/11/2025

I believe the single most important quality for indie developers is honesty. This is their secret weapon. It is nearly impossible for a Top 10 company to achieve full honesty because of their size and stakeholder structure. Honesty, however, allows you to consistently put out your authentic voice.

Recently, while consuming content in the indie space (podcasts and video), I’ve noticed a significant increase in marketing awareness. This often translates into the typical marketing discourse: “how to make trending things faster and avoid struggling too much.”

But that, in my humble opinion, misses the entire point of being an indie. Independence requires you to embrace the struggle and invest genuine effort—not just hours, but intense thought and creative energy. If you end up simply chasing trends, you risk falling into the trap of industrialization, product managerization, and creating derivative work.

I am not arguing against trend awareness or chasing money; of course, we work for money. But I am asserting that if you want to truly succeed in the indie space, you must prioritize honest self-expression. Put your authentic voice out there for real—even if your true call is to make a niche friends-to-lovers sim or a niche horror game.

Affording High Performance

Published by Tj'ièn Twijnstra on 18/11/2025

I’ve been working in a high performance environment for many years now. I’m amazed about the output of our small team (6 FTE+1 Free Lancer). To give you an example, we’re currently working on a casual puzzle game with a huge focus on narrative and world building. We’re approaching our 2 week release cadence which includes six to seven new fully animated story chapters and 90+ new levels, while releasing big new features every 4 weeks, with small and big tweaks, SDK updates, data gathering and general improvements, bug fixes and localization in many languages, while making sure we keep analyzing incoming data.

The casual puzzle space in which we’re operating is very competitive with thousands of entries a year with only a handful being able to succeed and enter the top 100. To get there, large teams (50-500 members) and large investments (1M-5M) are our competitors. And even in those teams, pressure to succeed is high and nothing but top performance is expected.

I’ve been thinking how we as a team make sure we are coping with this pressure. I believe we each individually have found a way to cope and collectively as a team found a way to facilitate and support each other. A large contributing factor for our small team is working from home. Not only does it cut out commute every day, saving a lot of time for each member. Working from home also afforded the environment where flexibility can occur. This flexibility in terms of working hours for instance is where some of our team members thrive.

We roughly work between 9-5 with strict attention rules around meetings. At least half of our team enjoys the ability to work during the quiet evenings, or pursuit a particular thought in the night. Others are able to schedule kids pick-up or going to the gym. And all of us enjoy the ability to let life happen and attend any important activity during working hours. Our team treats work as the second most important thing, next to our life outside of work. We cover for each other when someone is ill or experiences life changing events, we plan our schedules and priorities around vacations and time off, we accommodate members traveling the world and working from different time zone and generally we all help each other make it work.

But I think all of this would not be possible without a shared goal, without a shared ambition, without our internal drive to want to succeed. This focus enables us to do all of the above and I’m sure will drive us towards success.

The studio lie

Published by Paolo on 11/11/2025

Tim Plöger on LinkedIn shared a critique of the glib advice given to laid-off developers: “You got fired? Then start your own studio!”. This message often gets mixed up, confusing the business problem with the craft problem.

Tim, coming from a focus on the structural and financial side of the industry, correctly points out that starting a studio is not the answer. A studio isn’t just about making games; it’s about allocating people and financials, legal structuring, and sales. That’s a different type of work, and often, a recipe for quick failure for someone whose expertise is in pure creation.

The advice tells you to become an Executive/CEO when all you need to do is remain a Designer/Developer. My counterpoint to Tim was simple: “You don’t have money to buy bread? Well, maybe you have it to buy flour and cook your own bread.”

If your job is to design games, your energy should go into designing games. Spending six months, a year, or even two years sending out résumés without a response drains your energies. It is better to do your job every single day than to beg others while your energy wanes.

When you are laid off, you are given a clean slate, a golden opportunity to build the things you need.

Cook Your Own Bread

You have the chance to prove your adaptive insight (your ability to transfer design knowledge across genres). Here are three immediate actions for any designer, artist, or programmer who is waiting for “the next job”:

  1. Stop Applying, Start Prototyping: Turn your application time into creation time. Build simple, fast, collaborative projects. Don’t worry about polish; worry about fun and flow.
  2. Master the Instincts of the Market: Use this time to apply System Thinking. Pick a successful micro-genre (like the recent Friend-slop games) and try to replicate its core loop. Don’t copy the art; map the instincts (Acquisition, Gregariousness, Escape) that make it tick. This process demonstrates analytical skill far better than any résumé.
  3. Join the Flour-Buyers: Seek out other developers who are also “baking their own bread.” Join forces for a focused, two-week game jam or prototype challenge. The goal is not profit; the goal is to keep your creative engine running and generate concrete work that proves you’re a builder, not a waiter.

The best way to get hired is to be actively doing the job, with or without a corporate logo on your title.

Strategy as a creative act

Published by Paolo on 09/11/2025

Martin Walfisz, founder of Massive Entertainment and writer of the Connecting Pixels newsletter, recently hit a crucial nerve: Most game companies have ambition, but no clear strategy.

He talks about how, when he started out, his ambition was just “Explosions must look amazing!“. I see this same pattern everywhere. Most teams are building a feature-collage that relies on luck rather than design. The core problem is exactly what Walfisz identifies: we confuse motion with direction.

Ambition is Easy; Strategy is Courage

Ambition is a resume: “This game will be the best in the world, it will hit X million MAU, and it will have blockchain integration.” Ambition is free. Everyone has it.

Strategy, by contrast, is courage. Strategy is saying NO to the 99 good ideas so you can focus on the one great thing that your game, and only your game, is built to master.

Walfisz nails the essence: “Strategy is about deciding where to become great.”

  • Ambition asks: “What else can we add to appeal to everyone so we can make lots of money?”
  • Strategy asks: “What will we say no to, so we can double down on this one, unique feeling that respects the player’s time?”

Companies fear that choosing a lane will limit their creative freedom. But as Walfisz notes, it’s the opposite: boundaries don’t stifle creativity, they sharpen it.

Success Should Compound, Not Reset

When you build a game purely on ambition, its success is a lottery win. Walfisz points out the high cost of this: “Without a clear strategy, success doesn’t compound. It resets.”

If your strategy changes with every new project you are throwing away the expertise, the audience loyalty, and the pattern recognition you earned on the last project.

Success must become a pyramid built on the cumulative expertise of your team, not a single, isolated pillar of luck.

Look at the example of Landfall, which Walfisz cites: they were self-aware enough to realize their strength was “creating inventive, funny, highly shareable multiplayer experiences.” They focused on that one thing and restructured their studio around it. That is the definition of turning your culture into your strategy.

Thoughts on 996 (aka Crunch)

Published by Tj'ièn Twijnstra on 07/11/2025

I love my work and I work a lot. Yes, I feel that I have to, because I feel responsible for our team, for our game, for our publisher who’s placing a lot of trust in us and our game and I’m ambitious and eager to succeed. But I crunch when I feel like it. In our team, no-one is ever forced to crunch, nor is it expected. We repeat to ourselves and each other that we do not need to crunch.

I used to think crunch very much avoidable and is all due to bad planning, and to an extend it is. You always have to factor in that things take longer and that game development is very dynamic. But it’s not that simple. Ambitions and aspirations won’t be tamed that easily and having a drive to succeed is an unstoppable force.

But 996 (working from 9am to 9pm for 6 days a week) is extremely unhealthy, even for a single week, especially if it’s mandated and expected but you planned for 955. In our team, if we feel we’re running behind schedule, we reprioritize and focus on the things we can finish and replan for the things that fall of the schedule. So not only do you need to plan realistically, expect dynamic development and ambitious team members, you also need to be flexible and adept to any situation to make sure crunch is not considered a tool.

Crunch is avoidable and should be avoided, but crunch if you feel like it on a personal level.

Ways to lose the game

Published by Paolo on 29/10/2025

Since 2016 I worked as a freelancer for many realities. This fact gave me certain insight on the typical mistakes leaders, product managers, and producers, do when they decide on the strategy to follow.

1️⃣ Starting with the Metrics

“Data” is just an unformed, meaningless glob until you apply a creative hypothesis to it. You need to start with the “why” and the “what if,” not the number on the spreadsheet or the curve you saw on Sensor Tower. Stop treating data as a god; treat it as a confusing cloud of information. Your goal is to get your references at the start, not make decisions on them. Decisions have to be made on what makes you (you, intended as a team) special.

2️⃣ Seeking Consensus

Good strategy is always contrarian. If everyone in the room agrees that your next game should be “Fortnite, but with dragons,” be terrified. Consensus, by definition, is average. Have you read the Age of Average? This is how it starts. If everybody is doing something in the market, that something is not disruptive anymore. Follow others is not a good strategy, it can be a tactic for a while. But your goal as a leader is to create the right strategy to disrupt.

3️⃣ Providing a Goal, Not a Strategy

Many “strategies” are actually goals dressed up in fancy slides. “We need to hit X million MAU.” Okay, but how? That’s a target, not a strategy. KPIs are indicators used to understand many things; among them, you can also understand if you reached a specific goal of course. But the goal has to be something like “invent a new genre”, or “make the most downloaded free puzzle game on Steam”. Something achievable, of course, but ambitious.

4️⃣ Running a Strategy Workshop

You can’t expect creative strategy on a timetable, or to arise from a formula. Strategy emerges messily over time. In the shower, in the gaps between the work (remember my “eureka” moment?). It doesn’t come from a neat stack of Post-Its. I have been in plenty ultra long workshops where in the end nothing happened.

5️⃣ Putting Strategy in the Calendar

Strategy isn’t a “task” that you “schedule,” like an art review. It occurs in the unprompted, serendipitous moments that surprise you. It’s always on, somehow. It emerges from nuances, suddenly. Do the work, think as a strategist and it will come. And if not, you already have a strategy: shut down the project and stop losing money.

6️⃣ Looking for Proof

All strategy is a punt. A gamble. You can get some validation from soft-launch metrics, sure. But you’ll never be certain. The only proof you’ll find is by trying it. Stop looking for certainty; the real world is a chaos engine. These podcasts that only speak bad about the others? These “pundits” are not really in the game, they are judging from the outside many times. Again, do your work, step by step, every single day.

7️⃣ Making it Many Things, Not One Thing

Strategy is not a “list of stuff” (e.g., “We will integrate blockchain, launch F2P, and focus on narrative”). Strategy is one thing: the core fantasy, the single unique hook. Then organize and define the list of stuff you’re going to do. If you can’t point to that one thing, it doesn’t exist. Players want something important, not stuff to play.

8️⃣ Mistaking Boring for Intelligent

Man, with all those charts, all that jargon, and all that complexity, this strategy MUST be good! Ha, no. This isn’t a research paper for a thesis committee. It needs to be exciting—it needs to motivate the team, or it will never make a great game. Boring is fatal. And the team is probably composed by people really passionate about games.

9️⃣ Asking the Customer

Yes, of course, you must speak to the Player. But this doesn’t mean you should ask them what you should build and then build it. If it was that easy, every studio would be printing money. Their job is to tell you what they hate and what they love of what you are doing; your job is to build what they didn’t know they needed. It’s hard, very hard, but that’s the only way I know.

🔟 Hiding Your Opinions

You are not objective. Your strategy isn’t objective. And it shouldn’t be! Strategy is about making a choice. A subjective, opinionated bet. Those who embrace the fact that it’s all opinions and commit to them are the ones who master it.

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