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Tag: research

Impossible true stories

Published by Paolo on 27/06/2025

I watched the splendid documentary on Sandfall and Clare Obscure: Expedition 33 made by the Australian YouTube channel SkillUp.

Apart from the obvious learnings on commitment, passion, vision, and so on, I have found 3 important insight:

1. it’s super important to share what you do also as a side hustle out there. You may never know, maybe posting a couple of fan themes on a lost music forum may lead to meet special people to make special things.

2. a possible strategy for disruptive indie/AA games is to include people who never made a game in their entire life. Especially if you employ them in the parts more near of the final client, the player. Art, music, writing.

3. the best indicator that you are making a hit is in your internal playtests. It is something you feel while you play your build everyday, also one that is bad looking. We make games for others to play, but how can you sell people things you don’t actually like and be successful? If you see that everyone in your team is playing the game for fun, you have it.

Adding new to classics

Published by Paolo on 27/06/2025

I watched the new Netflix show produced by SONY Pictures Animation called “KPop Demon Hunters”. I am not in their target audience, also if I love the animation on 2s (a new pose each 2 photograms, instead than 1) launched by “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse” and I recognize the rest of visuals. Not surprising, but well made.

What I liked was the lore, also if I am too adult (not old :P) to understand the nuances of K-pop. I like its silliness and the irreverence of the protagonists, reminds me a lot of what I notice in teenagers: struggle to have followers, always be perfect, but also lots of stress and anxiety because of the dark present and no light on the long term.

I love the mixture between classic mythology with modern K-pop, also if I felt something missing on the demon side. Still, a great show to watch. I also liked that the characters (at least the female ones) are not too hypersexualized. I would like to say the same for the boys, but that’s not the case 😛

And, maybe it’s for the 3d, probably for the combat too, I think that from that proof of concept new lores may spark more fresh, for the action adventure games of the future! Recommended.

New Strands

Published by Paolo on 27/06/2025

Last week I have started playing Death Stranding (the first chapter, on PS Plus), and yesterday I have also read an interesting interview to the CEO of Supercell on the need for new type of games. I very much agree with that, so I started connecting the dots.

What console and indie games have that mobile still hasn’t get yet is the “useless beauty”. Things that are not designed or implemented for a specific KPI or data goal. Useless beauty is not that useless to me on the long term, also if you cannot see the immediate benefit. It shows our humanity, and prepares the terrain for cultural and trend settings.

Death Stranding is one of the most impactful experiences I am having in the last 10 year, on gaming side. And it contains a lot of things that make me thing “man, that’s weird, why did you put that?”. Actually, one after another. It’s overwhelming, and beautiful, and it doesn’t explain everything.

Also the last experiments from Supercell, which from a numbers perspective still haven’t found the formula, have something like that. They are much less authorial, the result of a team effort, different purpose, but still. I am sure that Kojima too is willing to make something to be remembered forever, but not played maybe. Different goals, but similar philosophies to me.

I don’t know if they will ever manage to create new genres, but to me the road is correct: not everything must have a direct impact on measures, useless beauty is human and players need wonder, not just mechanics.

Another chapter closed today

Published by Paolo on 28/02/2025

If you work in games during the next 5 years, you will probably work for or with Chinese companies.

Here in Southern Europe, the story was: China does things quickly and cheaply by copying. Today, in my industry and others, the story has changed. China now does better games. Maybe that story about doing things fast and dirty to arrive at perfection was true, in the end.

I have completed 5 months with Chinese developers and had challenges. I want to share my learning and also learn more from other people in my network and outside.

First of all, I have to say that I was born in Naples, Italy, and live in Barcelona, Spain. I speak 5 languages, and I am genuinely interested in other cultures. But still, I am biased like everyone. My intention is not to be disrespectful. I just want to share my observations through the lens of my context. And I repeat, I am interested in your takes.

Here’s what I have learnt in 5 months of working every day with Chinese colleagues:

1. They work a lot, and not because they are slaves of some system of sorts. They work a lot because they believe in community. Our concept of hard work here in Europe is related to our individual growth and improving shareholders’ value. In their case, it’s different: they work hard because they believe it improves society.

Fun fact: once I said “sorry, I don’t work on weekends”, and then I discovered that my sentence was offensive. Of course, it’s like saying, “Sorry, I don’t want to contribute to society” under their lens.

2. They will not argue nor question anything. A colleague told me that there is a saying in China: “Peace is the most valuable thing”. Here, we are way straighter in saying things, and sometimes we need conflict to progress. There, on the other hand, they are very polite. It was like working in the Italy of the ’50s in some cases.

Fun fact: during a meeting, an artist, red in the face, told to a European colleague, “you say a lot of f* words and it’s funny…”. It was embarrassing for them. Like I said, in the Italy of the ’50s, you didn’t say bad words!

3. They didn’t renounce their myth. In our culture, we passed (to say this very shortly) from myth to philosophy to science. Now, we “believe” in science mostly. For us, the term “myth” is similar somehow to a lie. “This is a myth” is like saying “this is false”. China has integrated the myth with the science, instead. And this reflects on their behavior and culture, a lot.

Fun fact: once I asked them, “why have Chinese games always hypersexualized characters?”. The CTO of the company answered me: “Because to us things like those are not important. These are just games and we want to sell them.”. Important things are others, in a society that didn’t lost the myth.

If you work with or for Chinese developers, please comment your thoughts!

GT7 a live-service game made with passion

Published by Paolo on 27/02/2025

I read the latest AMA from one of Polyphony Digital’s employees about Granturismo 7.

GT7 is my favorite live-service game. It relaxes me and it’s a title I’ve always followed, since the first Playstation. In the AMA I discovered that it’s a passion project of the creative director. It reminded me that message from the CEO of Larian Studios at The Game Awards about the importance of working on something you really believe should be out there. Certain things touch the hearts of players even if they can’t be measured.

Another interesting note is that to create a track it takes between 20 and 30 people and a year of work. About 40,000 man-hours. It surprised me a bit, because I’ve never worked on a similar title. But it says a lot about the claims I read about the productivity boost that certain technologies will offer in the future.

Making games requires a lot of work and that’s it. If one day a technology arrives that can reduce times, rest assured that it will do so without warning. Be careful what you believe without seeing, there is always an agenda behind it.

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.

Mismanagement

Published by Paolo on 13/01/2025

I read an article on Bloomberg written by one of my favourite journalists, Jason Shreier. It talks about some of the things that make a videogame fail.

Mismanagement is the keyword for that article. Mr. Shreier shared the article and the reactions were critical with managers. Which makes sense, managers are responsible for the management.

The piece mentioned also an employee who declared things like: “I spent some days just watching Netflix“.

Is this still a manager responsibility?

As an Italian my ethics at work are different from one gal in Shangai or an average lad in San Francisco. So, take my words are mere opinions.

It is common to be in the situation “I don’t know what to do”. Not everyone has the drive to find always something to do even when nobody sent any task. In complex projects, and videogames are wicked ones, there is always something to do.

Part of me believes that there are no excuses for that behavior. If you are watching Netflix while the company is paying you a salary, you are behaving unprofessionally. Another part accepts that we are all different and one can be a talent, but have not enough drive in some moment.

Mismanagement is not always a fault of managers. It still is their responsibility. That’s why it’s hard to find the right managers for a project.