This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
The stores are drowning in games. We can all see it, and it’s a direct consequence of something obvious: making a simple game has become quickly accessible. Godot, Unity, asset stores, AI for code, YouTube tutorials for absolutely anything. Development time has compressed brutally. So everyone’s doing it.
The result is a flood. Clones, games generated through semi-automated pipelines, products assembled rather than designed. Each of these games shares the same trait: made quickly, with a small team or solo, with little investment per unit.
When everyone does the easy thing, the hard thing gains value. Even Roblox is proving this, with its new strategy of focusing on HD games. If simple games become a commodity, then games that require something you can’t auto-generate become rare.
The thing that’s been living rent-free in my head
Teams in the near future have one new defining characteristic: they can be genuinely cross-functional. Not in the buzzword sense we’ve been hearing from companies for years. In a concrete, practical, radical way.
Some examples.
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A designer no longer has to wait for a programmer to build a prototype. With today’s tools, they can build something functional in hours. They can test their game loop before the meeting with the tech team is even in the calendar.
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An artist can implement directly in-engine without waiting for tech artist support. An artist who understands a bit of how the engine works is no longer an exotic exception — they’re just a normal asset to the team.
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A writer can test their narrative in a working build without filing a ticket and waiting for the gameplay team to “find a slot in the next sprint”.
The roles don’t disappear. The excuse does.
To be clear: I’m not saying specialised roles will become useless. An experienced tech artist does things a shader-graph artist will never pull off. A senior programmer solves problems that a designer with an AI coding assistant can’t even properly articulate.
That’s not the point. The handoff barrier between roles gets lower. And with that barrier goes the industry’s most comfortable excuse: that’s not my responsibility.
If in the past you could sit in a cosy niche and wait for someone else to do their bit, today that’s changing. A team that sits around waiting for the “programmer bottleneck” when the designer could prototype, or the “tech artist bottleneck” when the artist could implement, is a team wasting time artificially.
Agility isn’t an abstract value. It’s the concrete ability to take an idea from your head to a working screen in as little time as possible, with the resources available. Today, those available resources have changed.
The thing that’s hard to copy
There’s an underlying question running through all of this: what can’t be automated or cloned?
The answer I’ve landed on is: a team that genuinely works well together, around a vision that’s actually worth building, with enough overlapping skills that no single bottleneck can hold everything up.
That combination can’t be copied. You can’t prompt your way to it.
And it’s exactly that combination you need to make the games that, in the coming years, will have the best shot. What does that mean in practice? That the smartest companies will be the ones capable of retaining talent — not working people into the ground and then laying everyone off the moment the title ships.