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Paolo's Blog Posts

Dreaming of Switch 2

Published by Paolo on 08/05/2024

Nintendo said that during this fiscal year, they will announce Switch 2. As far as I remember, this is the first time that Nintendo has put a number on the previous one. That makes me think that they will not innovate that much, this time.

But maybe I am wrong, and I imagine which improvements Nintendo can bring to their business.

The first thing is that their controllers, influenced by the competitors I don’t know, got very complicated. We passed from the cross and two buttons to 2 sticks, a cross, 4 frontal buttons, 4 retro buttons. A simpler control system will make more people want the console.

What if my Switch 2 is also my mobile phone? I would buy that. A mobile smartphone capable of running WhatsApp, and LinkedIn and making my work that is also the console I can play with my daughter. A smartphone that I can plug on my projector and play bigger.

Being a smartphone, a camera can add AR features to games.

And maybe they could try to bring back the Gameboy printer why not?

Small nuances in game design

Published by Paolo on 06/05/2024

I am playing Squad Busters intensively these days. Hopefully, this game will work because it contains many elements I have been working on with another project up to last year (under NDA).

I am glad when top developers make certain design choices that I proposed or I was guessing but I didn’t have enough time to complete. “Please, Paolo, focus on this other task” is a classic when I start insisting on some point. It’s like when a singer sings exactly your feelings. Satisfying!

But I was also thinking of something else. I was in the middle of an intense moment. A player with a squad better than mine was chasing me. I didn’t have enough coins to open the chest, so I used a booster to open it.

And it reminded me of a quote from J. Riccitiello: “When you are six hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your clip and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you’re really not that price sensitive at that point in time”.

I remember that everyone hated that, the only difference was that Mr. R. was pitching a power-up instead of a booster.

(In the jargon adopted by the companies I have worked with, boosters are the ones you buy BEFORE a match, while you can get or create power-ups DURING the match)

The reality of things is that we like to win, as players. And we can also pay for that. I respect the choice of putting this element on a strategic level and not on a tactical one. The latter would have upset too many people.

Anyway, it’s interesting to see how a small nuance can make all the difference in game design. So that also a bad (in the sense of evil) idea can be played well if we have the right time and resources to work on it.

GTM, Innovation and Marketing

Published by Paolo on 03/05/2024

I read a post from a VC firm looking for projects to fund. One of the points was “clear GTM strategy”. GTM stands for go-to-market. Experts claim that the next big company will figure a novel way of distributing games out. Distribution is part of go-to-market of course.

I am fascinated by this concept of the minimum viable audience, which is the minimum number of fans you need to serve to make your business viable.

Another concept I like a lot, better than agile IMHO, is the shape-up methodology, where you basically set up deadlines and deliver making the best you can in the fraction of time you decided.

Those would be part of my go-to-market strategy, for sure.

Innovation in mobile games

The playbook is not working anymore and Players are claiming innovation, too. For mobile games, there are elements from the world of apps that mobile games never adapted and I don’t know why.

The first is the infinite scrolling feed. Mobile games are still stuck in the world of Flash games somehow. We still use pop-ups as if we’re operating on the World Wide Web. In some cases, I spend precious minutes closing pop-ups at every session. Also, video ads have to be dismissed with the X in top right corner. It is incredibly slow and frustrating.

An infinite feed guarantees engagement and also ads and special offers can be put in it. Every game can become more streamlined, helping the Players do other things while playing.

The second element is the widgets. You know that things that are not app icons that appear on your smartphone. Why should I enter the game to see who attacked me or to collect a daily bonus?

A widget would also be a reminder that the game is there, why is nobody using it?

I think that one of the issues we have with innovation is that we are not making enough efforts to find ways of measure certain design elements and choices. Everything can be measured in certain fashion. But more often than not designers are in a company just creating content, not solving problems. The “everyone is a designer” reigns always in contexts led by product managers, and there’s nothing to do with that.

The company I dream of has that issue fixed. But, I know, I am a dreamer.

Distribution

Marketing has become not about the brand, but about the people behind it. If you see the last ad from Supercell or you read about the last successes on PC, you will clearly see that.

Is it possible to make that scalable? Probably, yes. I would start from there.

The head of marketing from Larian Studios declared that marketing is dead and everyone is angry at him. He expressed quite bad, but I understood what he wanted to say. The marketing is super important, more than ever. But the old fashion of doing marketing is gone.

I completed my deck

Published by Paolo on 02/05/2024

Thanks to the help of two friends I have completed my deck to send as introduction to companies.

“Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two – and only these two — basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are ‘costs’.”

(P. Drucker)

This is valid, to me, for every business, also small like mine. Over the last couple of years that I have dedicated to helping gaming companies with innovation, I had to learn a lot about marketing and innovate my business myself.

I could have gone easier with my proposal: “I make levels for your game”, “I write narratives for your game”, “I will fix your tutorials”, or “I will create FPS maps for your game”. But I am not a specialist! I have worked on so many projects that I consider myself skilled in starting them.

Do you need to lay down your vision for a new project? I am your man. My specialization is in innovation. As many game designers out there, the vast majority of games I have worked on were never published. This is the reality of our business.

I can predict lots of issues and tackle them before it’s too late. My analogy capacity make me create new things with few elements. And I touch everything: systems, gameplay, levels and narrative. I also build in engine.

Project Silinha: first concept

Published by Paolo on 30/04/2024

I have an idea for a videogame buzzing in my head since many months. It should be an adventure game in a solar punk setting where the Player moves on a skate and fights capoeira.

The name of the project is Silinha for now. Silinha is the family nickname of my wife and I want to dedicate the project to her. In fact, also the main character should be similar to her.

The story is inspired by 3%, a Netflix Brazilian series. But I want it to be solar punk, utopic, not post-apocalyptic.

I have started sketching out ideas and engaging with the Solar punk community on Reddit. This is my very first concept:

It’s ugly, I know, but I can see a lot of things in it. It’s not a good concept to share with a team, but it works for a solo project. I didn’t use AI to generate it, I looked actively for images (skaters, capoeira, solar punk) and made a collage in GIMP. I sketched on top to get the layout and then used plain colors to fill the shapes.

It’s bad, it’s ugly, but it’s mine and it’s my first attempt. So I am happy with it!

Update on Sentendo

Published by Paolo on 29/04/2024

This week I decided to take down the Sentendo thing. If you’re reading for the first time, Sentendo is the name that I give to my small business of game design consulting. It means a lot to me, but it’s clearly not working.

I prefer from now on to go simply with my name and surname. Being seen as a brand can put some interesting client in a weird spot and they can go away. I prefer to be more natural.

I am finishing the deck to send to my clients, and it’s hard.

Happy 25 April, you all!

Published by Paolo on 25/04/2024

Today is a special day for the nation where I was born. 25 of April represents the Anniversary of Italy’s Liberation. It’s a national holiday that commemorates the culmination of the liberation of Italy from German occupation and the Italian civil war in the latter phase of World War II.

Today I want to dedicate a post to 3 Italians who are contributing to making a great industry. I want to share with you 3 talks that are available for free and online, that prove the Italian contribution to our fantastic micro-world where lots of people would work.

The first talk is by Riccardo Zacconi, who years ago founded King (nowadays part of Activision/Blizzard). I remember having seen this talk years ago and it made me dream about working for King.

The second talk is an interview with the solo-dev, creator of Vampire Survivors one of the top indie games of last year. Luca Galante created a simple game with lore that is not possible to understand if you’re not an Italian, but it’s SO FUNNY if you are. Clerici, Dommario, Rottin’Ghoul are all references to the Italian trash culture and irony.

The last talk is with Massimo Maietti, one of the creators of Monopoly GO! which is the last huge success in the video games industry. I like to recognize in this person something very Italian, the connection we always make with culture and history in everything we make.

What the 3 have in common?

  • They are all Italians
  • They all had to live out of Italy
  • They made success in Angloamerican environment (curiously the Angloamericans helped a lot during liberation)
  • They all came from gambling games, like me. I will always say it: gambling games can be bad to you, I respect that. But they put you in contact with something very innate in the human compulsion. It’s all about amigdala!

Hypercasual was R&D with glamour

Published by Paolo on 24/04/2024

Now that the “hypercasual” word is not cool anymore, let’s talk about the benefits of R&D (which is a term for dinos, at this point).

Research and development in video games leads to the discovery of new technologies, mechanics, dynamics, and narratives. It is an activity that is hard to integrate within a business, especially in high-competitive environments.

I helped a couple of years a developer of hypercasual games and, in the end, to me, that was a little miracle. Why? Because for the first time in my career, I saw the fruit of R&D becoming an actual, shippable product. The CEO was happy, the developer was happy, and the marketer was happy.

Proposals were coming directly from publishers following trends, there were syntheses of popular indie and AAA gameplays. There was also heavy research on social/viral trends. I felt a volcano of ideas, that was a good period professionally speaking.

And it was because of the collision of 3 hacks: the CEO could save money thanks to the Unity Asset Store, developers could save time and the marketer could use concrete techniques to reach the hypercasual audience.

Many Players of hypercasual games were tech-savvy and very smart. They loved to find the flaws in these prototypes and they had fun in discovering how to become a “hacker”. They went very deep into the rules (which were the only elements well thought out) and they found a way of cracking them.

A breath of fresh air in a context where timers, special offers, and artificial scarcity were playing with their compulsivity!

Today the business model is gone, because it is not possible anymore to target directly these people with ads. It’s much more expensive to reach them so the little you make with ad monetization doesn’t cover the costs.

But these Players are still there, waiting for super innovative mechanics to break. Shipping “R&D games” every 2 weeks is still an available choice.

Happy World Book Day

Published by Paolo on 23/04/2024

Someone is claiming that AAA is dead when in fact is quite the opposite. AAA games are still driving the vast majority of revenue.

AAA development is struggling, though. I have never had the pleasure of working on a AAA game. That’s because every time I applied to an AAA company the answer was that my resume didn’t show AAA experience.

One of the good things about mobile free-to-play, instead, was the inclusion of professionals also from outside of the games industry. I had personally the pleasure of working with marketers, product managers, and UX designers coming from the world of apps, fintech, and so on. That created an explosive new opportunity where also AAA professionals come to work.

Endogamy creates struggles. Specialization is good also because it opens the opportunity for generalists, people with broader knowledge, to enter into the “game” and create disruption. Why are we often closing those new windows?

AAA development is struggling with endogamy, in my humble opinion. And mobile f2p is starting to follow the trend, too. When you have markets with high risks and high possible returns, often experience can be a setback. We need more opportunities for people with different backgrounds.

We need frogs that go deep, hedgehogs that go straight forward, but we also need birds that can see the horizon, and foxes who can spot different patterns in the forest.

A great book that demonstrates this thesis is “Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World”, by David Epstein.

Use analogies to find new formulas

Published by Paolo on 22/04/2024

Videogames are sold online and physically to people. Some game is not sold, it’s given for free. Virtual good inside of the game are sold. Video games are fully into capitalism. And capitalism has many characteristics, one of them is that it repeats itself a lot.

You see constantly new trends appearing from nowhere, completely unexpected. And then the system copies, reproduces, re-skins. That’s because of the fundaments of capitalism. And there is nothing we can do about it. It is what it is, so let’s just enjoy and observe it.

Or maybe you want to build something disruptive, something new. In that case you better look from outside of the core of your business, games in this case. With analogies you can find something maybe in sports, or maybe in shoes business that can be applied to videogames.

It’s like repeating in the capitalistic way, but repeating something that out of our system. Something that can become new.