This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
The games industry has been in crisis for a few years now, like the rest of the world. Mass layoffs, studios closing, investment drying up.
The crisis isn’t a surprise. Things don’t grow forever — that’s a natural law. And yet people coming out of MBA programmes and finance courses seem to forget this basic fact, or perhaps they’re trained to ignore it. The result is that unrealistic expectations of continuous growth are created for investors, expectations the industry simply can’t sustain for long. Add the global geopolitical situation to that, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.
What struck me most, though, was the behaviour of developers themselves.
This year in Madeira an interesting workshop took place. Participants were first asked to pitch an original game, then to build a hypothetical investment fund with a million dollars. The result: most of the money ended up going to tools, tech infrastructure, and ecosystems like Roblox. The very same developers who had just passionately pitched an original project wouldn’t have funded it themselves.
As one participant put it: “I literally built an investment firm that wouldn’t have funded my own pitch.”
It’s a system that rewards short-term returns and penalises long-term vision. When money becomes the goal rather than the means, everyone falls into line.
This isn’t a game for people without a safety net
I should be honest about where I stand in all of this. I’m an independent consultant, and one of the reasons I chose that path is precisely that I understand this mechanism and I’d rather not be dependent on it. But there’s another reason too: my parents are well-off. I’ve had a safety net that allowed me to stay in this industry through the rough patches. Not everyone has that.
The games industry today is increasingly an industry for people who can afford to wait. For people who already have family money behind them, who don’t need this month’s salary to cover the rent. This is a problem not just of fairness, but of quality. You’re shutting out talent that simply can’t afford the structural risks of such an unstable industry.
So what do you do?
I look to Hollywood with genuine interest, because it’s found some practical answers to similar problems.
- The slate model: spread risk across multiple projects instead of betting everything on a single blockbuster. It means accepting that some will fail, but that the overall portfolio holds up.
- Structural protections for creatives: Hollywood’s unions exist because without them the balance of power between capital and talent is too heavily skewed. The games industry needs similar structures.
- The A24 model: small, curatorial, with a clear editorial identity. It picks the projects it believes in, makes them with care, and generates sustainable profits. Modest scale and a sharp vision can coexist with financial health.
A solvable problem
What’s needed are financial structures built around the actual timelines of game development, not venture capital cycles. More forums where developers can practise thinking like investors before they’re ever in a real boardroom. Models that give a studio enough runway to build something that lasts.
This is the moment when the people with decision-making power — investors, publishers, leads — can choose to build something more solid than what came before.