This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
There’s a belief, among the finance people who now call the shots in my beloved industry, that because we’re in a large, mature sector, the only sensible move is to invest in things that are bigger, shinier, better.
But getting to bigger and better generally means going through smaller first. Anyone who’s studied the history of video games can see that easily enough.
There’s a video I watched yesterday on YouTube where Ross, a data scientist at Game Oracle, does exactly that: he analysed sales data from over 62,000 developers on Steam. The figure that struck me most is that only one in five developers publishes a second game. Those who stay in the game through to their fourth or fifth title see their chances of a significant hit climb from one in ten to something close to a coin flip. That’s compounding advantage — reusable code, a community built over time, a genuine understanding of what actually works.
Statistically, the Call of Dutys of tomorrow will come from something that would make a major VC smile politely and move on today. It’s worth looking at how the giants we have now actually got started.
Minecraft: one man, very little money, and a lot of drive
Markus “Notch” Persson wrote the first version of Minecraft alone, at home, drawing inspiration from Infiniminer and Dwarf Fortress. On 17 May 2009 he uploaded an alpha to the indie forum TIGSource and sold it for $10, with no marketing plan whatsoever. There was a rough prototype and a community that started sending back feedback, ideas, mods. That loop between a lone developer and his community became, over the years, the best-selling game in history.
Fortnite: a game that was struggling
Before Battle Royale, Fortnite was “Save the World” — a PvE building-and-survival mode that Epic Games had spent years developing, released in 2017 to a fairly muted reception. When PUBG blew the battle royale genre wide open, a small internal team (the same one working on Unreal Tournament) repurposed the existing engine and assets to build the new mode in roughly two months. It was supposed to stay in the background, locked behind a purchase of Save the World.
It only became standalone and free-to-play in the final rush before launch — more out of necessity than vision.
If they’d been shut down straight away? Well, it would have been lost.
Call of Duty: a brand-new studio, 22 people, $1.5 million
Infinity Ward was founded in 2002 by Vince Zampella, Grant Collier, and Jason West, veterans of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. The entire founding team — 22 people — came from that same previous project. Activision invested $1.5 million for a 30% stake in the studio, a modest sum even by the PC standards of the time. The first Call of Duty, released in 2003, was a solid game but nothing like the phenomenon we know today. It took another three entries before Modern Warfare, in 2007, turned the series into the hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars franchise it is now.
The real investment is staying in the game
None of these three giants was born as a “big, ambitious, best-in-class” bet. They started small — often inside projects that were struggling or studios that had barely formed — and only became enormous after multiple iterations, second attempts, and communities nurtured over time.
If you’re an investor, the right question is how long you can afford to let a team stay in the game long enough to land on the right project. If you’re a developer, the job is to finish the game in front of you, ship it, and use it as the foundation for the next one.
Creativity needs direction and constraints, but it can’t survive this new start-up mindset of wanting everything at once and right now. That’s not how you build the industry of the future — investment needs vision too.