This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
Over the past few months, the same questions keep coming up. The tone is almost always anxious. I’ve tried to line them up and answer them in my own way.
1. Are we making more games than the market can absorb?
Production capacity is growing, AI promises to push it even further, and yet players still have the same number of hours in the day. The argument seems to hold up.
And yet this past year, with one of the most packed release calendars in recent memory, told a different story. Players have far more time — and far more appetite to spend — than we give them credit for. You don’t need to finish a game to feel good about having bought it. Just look at your own Steam library: mine is full of games I’ve started, dropped, and will get back to eventually. Buying them is already part of the enjoyment.
The market absorbs well-made games just fine. What struggles in a crowded landscape is the mediocre game — the one that in a quieter year might have scraped by, and today disappears within a week. I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: games are a form of art, and the people who play them can tell the difference between something made purely to sell and something made to say something unique.
2. Is this a funding crisis, or are we funding games by rules that no longer apply?
I lean towards the second. The industry has stopped growing at the pace it once did, and the investment models built on those growth curves have aged badly. Anyone pitching a business plan with 2020-style projections will rightly get the “heard it all before” look.
There’s something else that doesn’t get said enough. For years, the assumption was that putting someone from a big AAA studio in charge of a new team was a safe bet. Managing three hundred people inside an existing structure is one job. Building a studio from scratch, on a shoestring, with no safety net, is a completely different one. The string of ventures led by ex-Riot, ex-Blizzard alumni and so on proved that. Many promised a lot and delivered little, and investors haven’t forgotten.
Investors want to see clear distribution strategies that do something a bit different, ideally backed by solid numbers. And if your business isn’t built around growth but around building intellectual property, you’re better off looking at other funding models and saving yourself the headache.
3. If AI makes execution cheaper and faster, what’s left that’s defensible?
I’ll start by questioning the premise, because I’m not convinced. I think AI will make development bigger before it makes it cheaper.
Generating more assets and more code means someone still has to review them, test them, discard them, integrate them. The bottleneck shifts to revision and QA, and that’s where complexity balloons. Once the excitement dies down, we’ll see new specialised roles emerge just to keep all of this running — and the final bill will be higher than it is today. If I could previously develop one mechanic to a certain level, and now I can develop five simultaneously, that also raises the bar for the complexity players expect from us.
So what remains defensible? What’s always been there: the taste of the person who decides what to keep and what to cut, the relationship with your players, the ability to say no. The more material there is on the table, the more valuable the person who knows how to choose.
4. If no one is hiring juniors today, who will the seniors of tomorrow be?
This is the easiest one, which is precisely why it baffles me that people keep asking it. The companies that will still be here tomorrow are the ones investing in their juniors today.
Every single company that stops hiring juniors is making a choice that looks sensible on this year’s spreadsheet. If everyone does it, in five years the senior talent pool will be empty and eye-wateringly expensive. Those who invested in people when it was hard work will have an advantage that money simply can’t buy.
If you’re a junior, don’t lose heart — focus on making things, putting your voice out there, and meeting people. If you’re a founder, think about the future of the industry you live and work in.
5. Are we designing creative risk out of games?
Good design is a balance between what the player expects and a well-placed surprise that catches them off guard in just the right way. Strip out all the risk and you’re left with a game everyone recognises and no one remembers.
It’s natural for large companies to play it safe — they have a lot to lose, shareholders to keep happy, franchises to protect. But that caution leaves an enormous amount of space for anyone who’s small, fast, and willing to try something new. Every time the big players retreat into the safe formula, a door opens for someone else.
It’s worth always keeping the core fantasy of our games front of mind. Push against it with ideas drawn from other media. And be bold enough to bring those ideas in through your own creative lens — players tend to appreciate that far more than we expect.