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• Creating strategy is creative business design, much like designing a game. Strategy certainly needs analysis, but analysis only gives you the ingredients — your creativity decides what to cook.

• Start with reality: an honest read of what your organisation can genuinely become excellent at, combined with where the market is leaving room for it. Strategy lives in that overlap.

• The heart of it is choice — deciding where to focus, how to win, and what to stop. A strategy that tries to preserve every opportunity is no strategy; it’s FOMO.

• It only becomes real when it changes decisions: capital allocation, organisational structure, leadership, and the everyday language people actually use and remember.

• Strategy cannot be outsourced. Advisers can sharpen the analysis, but only the CEO, board and leadership team have to live with the consequences.

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I recently had a discussion about how game companies experiencing complex challenges should think about and implement new strategies—not least given the turmoil in the industry.

Over nearly thirty years, I’ve helped create strategies as a founder, CEO and investor—most recently for a game company that was overextended, under serious financial pressure, and lacked a coherent direction.

Strategy in the games industry is too often mistaken for one of two extremes: either an endless deck of corporate analysis from management consultants, or an unguided creative vision that tells you what games to make but not what company to build.

Strategy is inherently a creative endeavour: business design.

It requires analysis. You need to understand your organisation, your market, your competitors, your customers and where the world is heading. But analysis only gives you the ingredients. It does not tell you what to cook.

Your creativity is what turns those ingredients into a possible future.

In that sense, creating a strategy resembles designing a game.

When designing a game, you begin with your team: what it cares about, what it understands and what it can do well. Then you look outward. What are players responding to? Where is the market crowded, and where is there room for something new? The answers do not resolve every design detail—you figure those out as you build—but they establish a direction and help you decide what belongs and what does not.

Creating a company strategy is the same kind of process. It requires an honest assessment of organisational capability and market direction, followed by choices about capital, structure, leadership and what the company will stop doing. And those choices are often painful and contentious, if you’re doing strategy right.

Strategy starts with reality

Before choosing a direction, you need an honest understanding of where you are today.

A few years ago, when I joined a large games company as its CEO, I was tasked with developing a coherent strategy. The company had been investing, building products and making acquisitions for years, but no clear logic tied those decisions together. Older strategy documents existed, but none felt genuine or operationally real. In practice, the business had no strategy, so the work had to start almost from scratch.

Begin with the organisation. What has performed well, and what has not? Which strengths are real and repeatable? Which successes came from strong execution, and which depended on timing, luck or a few exceptional people carrying the organisation?

Commercial performance is the clearest place to begin. A company that cannot create sustainable commercial success will eventually run out of time. But the numbers only show what happened. The more useful question is why it happened. What did the organisation actively do to create that result, and can it do it again?

Identify the real problem. You also need to understand what strategy the company is already following, whether deliberately or by default. What assumptions is it built on? Where is it working, and where is it creating friction? From there, identify the central problem the new strategy must solve. If you cannot state that problem clearly, you are not ready to choose a solution for it.

Then look outside. How are customer expectations, technology and competition changing? You do not need to understand every trend in the industry, but you need to understand how the relevant part of the market is changing, and what that means for the company’s choices.

At the company I ran, our real strengths were in high-quality, creative indie games for PC and console — not mobile, not free-to-play, not AAA. So most of what was happening in mobile or live service was, for us, secondary. The question became narrower: where was the PC and console market leaving room for a focused publisher and developer of premium indie games?

The truly useful work comes from combining that analysis with the leadership team’s own experience, judgment and imagination. Only the leadership team can decide which future it believes is plausible and worth preparing for.

Strategy is creative choice

Once you understand the organisation and have a view of where the market is going, the leadership team has to make choices.

Imagine a possible future. Which opportunities will you pursue? Which will you ignore? What kind of company are you trying to become?

This is where strategy becomes creative: the leadership team has to imagine a coherent future, test it, refine it and finally commit to it.

At the company I led, that meant becoming a focused publisher and developer of premium indie games—a deliberate bet on one gap in the market, and a commitment to stop trying to be everything else. The analysis identified the opportunity; deciding how to build the company around it was the creative part.

Avoid the traps. A few are particularly common. The first is capability delusion: choosing a direction that requires the organisation to become something it has little realistic ability to become. The second is aspiration without a path: describing an exciting future without the stepping stones required to reach it.

Know when to say no. Choosing where to focus also means choosing where not to. A strategy that tries to preserve every opportunity is no strategy. It’s FOMO. One of the hardest things I do as a leader is to decide which teams, products, markets and capabilities deserve more attention, and which should be reduced, harvested or stopped.

The same applies to innovation: where experimentation is necessary, where proven methods are sufficient, and how much resource the company can commit to R&D.

Protect the friction. Strategy also fails when every stakeholder’s existing priorities are preserved. You can call it consensus laundering: disagreement is smoothed away until the final strategy makes no meaningful choices.

I had to make those trade-offs while leading a company under severe financial pressure. With an incomplete strategy and dwindling runway, we couldn't wait for perfection. We used a provisional strategy to make immediate, hard choices: deciding which games and dev teams to protect, and which to close. Even an imperfect strategy gave us a rational basis for acting. Without that, any direction could be defended, and the cuts would have become arbitrary and political.

Strategy becomes execution

A strategy becomes useful when it starts changing decisions.

Spend wisely. Capital allocation is the obvious place to begin. Every major investment should be tested against the strategy: is this where we have chosen to focus, or are we making a deliberate exception to go off-strategy?

Build for the strategy. It may require different structures, capabilities and leadership. Some people can grow into those needs; others may not. The gaps must be addressed through training, hiring, partnerships or acquisitions. “The organisation will step up” is not an implementation plan.

In the turnaround I mentioned, that meant removing two layers of management. The executive team had become too distant from the real business to see clearly what was happening. Under pressure, those layers had also begun to breed defensiveness, with managers protecting their positions and past decisions. They could be rebuilt once the company stabilised.

Drive internalisation. A company-wide strategy also needs to be translated by the organisation itself. I’ve run workshops in which each team worked out what the strategy meant for its own priorities and decisions. The point was for teams to make it theirs, rather than just receive it from me in a presentation. That internalisation is part of making the strategy real.

For a strategy to be lived every day, it has to be expressed in language the organisation recognises as its own. A strategy that sounds intelligent and well researched but that no one understands is worthless. Short phrases, clear priorities and a few good slogans can go a long way. I ended our strategy deck with a handful of declarations: “Make developers the stars”, “Sell like hell” and “Take ownership; make decisions”. People remember and repeat lines like those, not paragraphs.

Delegate mandates and assess results. The rollout should also clarify decision rights: which decisions teams can make themselves, and which require executive approval. A strategy should reduce unnecessary escalation, not create more of it.

You ideally also need a way to tell whether the strategy is working before the financial results arrive — a few stepping stones and leading indicators, alongside organisational health and customer satisfaction, will show whether the momentum is building.

A good strategy should remain relevant for several years, but its assumptions and execution should be reviewed once or twice a year. We operate in a fast-changing industry, so not all strategies will survive contact with reality for long. If commercial results disappoint, or the organisation experiences persistent friction with the chosen direction, it may be time to reassess either the strategy or the organisation executing it.

Strategy must be owned

Many people should contribute to a strategy, but the executive team must lead the creation of it. The board should challenge it and ultimately approve it. External advisers can add research, frameworks and an outside perspective.

But ownership cannot be shared so that accountability disappears.

Make it yours. The CEO has to own the strategy, believe in it and argue for it. A Chief Strategy Officer or consultant can support the work, but cannot carry that responsibility. If the strategy fails, the CEO cannot blame the process or the advisers.

The leadership team does not need to agree on every point during the debate. But once the strategy is decided, its members need to commit to it and lead others through it. If a leader fundamentally does not believe in the chosen direction, that eventually becomes an organisational problem that must be resolved.

Diagnose and act. Once implementation begins, the CEO and board should regularly review the results and leading indicators together. They need to distinguish between weak execution, a capability gap and a strategy built on assumptions that no longer hold.

In the end, the board and CEO need to be aligned. If persistent disagreement makes alignment impossible, either the CEO or the composition of the board ultimately needs to change.

Closing

No strategy guarantees success. Markets move, competitors act, products fail and organisations learn. Strategy gives a company coherent direction and a shared basis for making decisions as those things happen.

Analysis and frameworks help narrow the possibilities. But the creative work is choosing which future to pursue, why the organisation can succeed there and what it should stop doing. Leadership then has to own that choice, shape the organisation around it and keep testing it against changing conditions.

A good strategy turns an imagined future into a coherent system of choices. It helps people across the company understand what matters, what does not and how their everyday decisions contribute to the direction of the business. If it cannot do that, it may still be an interesting document. But it is not a useful strategy.

That combination of imagination and coherence is why the comparison with game design stays with me. You cannot analyse your way to a great game, and you cannot analyse your way to a great strategy. In both, someone has to imagine what is not there yet, choose to build it and keep refining it as reality unfolds.

Appendix: A practical strategy process

Here is the full process distilled into a practical sequence that leadership teams can use and adapt.

1. Strategy starts with reality

• Understand the current strategy and any proposed shifts.

• Assess the organisation’s strengths, weaknesses and why past performance happened.

• Identify the central problem the strategy needs to solve.

• Analyse where the market is heading.

• Test whether the current strategy and organisation fit that future.

2. Strategy is creative choice

• Find the overlap between organisational capability and market opportunity.

• Choose where to focus, how to succeed, and what to stop pursuing.

• Explain why the company is well placed to succeed in that direction.

• Use simple frameworks to structure the thinking.

• State the assumptions the strategy depends on.

• Test the emerging strategy broadly without diluting ownership.

• Avoid capability delusion, aspiration without a path, and consensus laundering.

3. Strategy becomes real through execution

• Translate the choices into capital allocation.

• Design the organisation and leadership needed to execute them.

• Close capability gaps by training, hiring, partnering, acquiring, or stopping.

• Clarify decision rights.

• Break the strategy down by division and team.

• Define immediate priorities, stepping stones, leading indicators, and financial outcomes.

• Use language people can understand and remember.

• Build rollout and internalisation into the strategy process.

4. Strategy must be owned

• The executive team creates and drives the work.

• The board stays involved and ultimately approves the strategy.

• Consultants and strategy teams support; they do not own.

• The CEO believes in the strategy and accepts accountability for it.

• Review it regularly against commercial performance and organisational friction.

• If the CEO and board cannot align, it is a governance problem.

This essay is part of my ongoing series, Connecting the Pixels, where I explore how technology, creativity, and culture intersect in the future of interactive entertainment.

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• The old cycle is broken: Games once launched, peaked, and cleared space for the next wave. Now successful titles persist while new releases compete with years of back catalog.

• Five pressures compound: Competition is cumulative, demand fragmented, spending concentrated, discovery volatile, capital requires proof. Together, they’ve compressed profit margins and increased the cost of being wrong.

• New leverage is emerging: Owned player relationships beat fleeting attention campaigns, smaller teams achieve more, technology compresses costs, validation happens continuously, and creation/distribution boundaries are blurring.

• The shift is structural: Traditional assumptions about “getting back to normal” no longer hold. Teams that rethink fundamentals now can still find footing; those waiting for stability are stumbling for ground that no longer exists.

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“When will things stabilize and go back to normal?”

It’s a question I’ve heard repeatedly over the past year. It’s often framed as a reaction to the industry’s rapid growth during COVID—as if what’s going on now is simply a correction back to baseline.

I don’t think that’s what’s happening. The underlying shift we’re seeing is the consequence of a maturing industry.

For a long time, the games industry operated on a quiet assumption: players move on. A title would launch, spike, taper off, and eventually make room for the next wave. Competition was largely release-window driven.

But over the past few years, our reality has shifted dramatically.

The competition has never been stronger. Funding conversations have changed tone. Projects are harder to justify. Discovery is increasingly less predictable. A small number of games and platforms absorb a disproportionate share of attention and spending, while the rest of the market operates under increasing margin pressure.

At the same time, the tools and practices for building games are evolving just as quickly. Teams can be smaller without being less ambitious. Early access, live playtesting, and open development have turned validation into an ongoing process rather than a late-stage gamble.

The defining tension today is clear: the bar is rising for teams that try to operate as they always have, even as new capabilities emerge that can restore leverage to those who adapt deliberately.

Structural pressures

The current market pressure on game studios doesn’t come from a single source. It emerges from the interaction of several dynamics that reinforce each other.

Competition is cumulative
Games do not age out of the market as they used to. Successful titles continue to attract players and spending for years. New releases therefore compete not just with their peers, but with an accumulated back catalog of readily available products, often sold at steep discounts or included in subscription libraries.

Demand has fragmented
Player tastes have diversified across genres, formats, platforms, and play patterns. While this creates more niches, it also means fewer games can rely on broad appeal, making it harder to amortize large production costs for anything but the largest blockbuster franchises.

Consumer spending has concentrated
A relatively small number of games and platforms capture a disproportionate share of consumer spending, driven by live-service dynamics, social gravity, and platform economics. Titles like Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft retain player attention over long periods. For the rest of the market, competition happens at lower and more volatile price points, with thinner margins and less room to absorb production risk.

Discovery is volatile
Distribution platforms increasingly control visibility through algorithmic systems. While these systems can surface relevant content, they also introduce volatility. Small changes in platform behavior can have outsized effects on traffic and revenue, making discovery less predictable. This volatility is further compounded by accelerating content supply: more games, updates, and experiences competing for the same finite attention.

Capital follows evidence
Funding decisions have shifted toward projects that can demonstrate traction, data, or clear comparables. This reduces risk for investors, but raises the bar for new teams and original ideas. Entry into the market increasingly requires proof that, by definition, is hard to obtain without already being in the market.

What’s changing now is not just the shape of the market, but the speed at which these dynamics compound.

Shifting sources of leverage

The pressures shaping today’s market are real, structural, and unlikely to reverse. But they are not the whole picture. Alongside them, a different set of forces change how games are built, released, and sustained.

Owned relationships reduce discovery dependency
As platform-driven discovery becomes more volatile, direct relationships with players grow in importance: mailing lists, communities, social presence, and ongoing dialogue. This is attention that compounds over time and provides a more stable foundation for launch, iteration, and long-term engagement. Increasingly, these relationships are built not just around products, but around visible creators. Public development, individual voices, and recognizable authorship turn teams into followable entities.

Team size is no longer a proxy for success
The historical link between team size, scope, and production value has weakened significantly. Smaller teams can now ship games that previously required far larger organizations. This changes the cost structure and lowers the threshold at which projects become viable.

Technology compresses creation costs
Engine maturity, asset marketplaces, procedural tools, and AI-assisted workflows continue to reduce the cost of production in many areas. This increases room for creativity, by making iteration cheaper in every phase of development.

Validation has moved earlier
Early access, open development, playtests, and soft launches allow teams to generate real player data long before full release. This shifts decision-making from prediction to observation and provides the evidence capital now requires. Projects no longer need to rely solely on internal conviction; they can be shaped, corrected, or stopped earlier, while the cost of change is still manageable.

Creation and distribution are converging
The boundary between making a game and bringing it to market is increasingly blurred. Creation tools, analytics, community management, and distribution infrastructure are becoming more integrated. This lowers some barriers to entry, but also rewards teams that think holistically about production, marketing, and operations from the start.

What this means for developers

In a market where competition accumulates, attention compounds, and capital follows evidence, success depends as much on where risk is avoided as on where it is taken.

We need to let go of practices that were once sensible defaults: building to fixed scopes before external validation, staffing for peak production, and treating marketing as something that happens at the end of development rather than alongside it.

The core questions are now how to:

• attract and retain attention continuously without overcommitting capital upfront;

• treat validation as a continuous process, not a gate at the end of production;

• build direct player relationships as strategic assets, not marketing byproducts;

• design teams, scopes, and budgets around adaptability rather than maximum ambition.

These are not easy transitions, and they represent real departures from how many teams have historically operated. Nonetheless, the market remains unforgiving, and the bar continues to rise.

The ground is shaking because the industry forces are fundamentally changing. This is not a comfortable shift. But it is happening, whether we like it or not.

This essay is part of my ongoing series, Connecting the Pixels, where I explore how technology, creativity, and culture intersect in the future of interactive entertainment.

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• Starting your own studio requires a dedicated mindset: fast decisions are yours to make, and you must stay focused on both creativity and business from day one.

• The founding team matters more than any concept; aligned ambition, defined responsibilities, and a solid shareholders’ agreement are essential.

• A studio pitch needs strategy, not just a game idea. Partners want to understand what kind of company you intend to build and how you plan to operate beyond the first project.

• Funding takes longer than most founders expect. Showing progress becomes your credibility, and ambition must match your position and runway.

• Early momentum comes from sharing your pitch widely, building something playable as soon as you can, testing it with real players, and learning from every cycle.

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“What if I started something of my own?”

The question never fully goes away. I’ve been in this industry for almost thirty years, founded several studios, sold them, run a public company, and invested in dozens of teams, and I still feel the pull. There’s something about building from nothing, with people you trust, that no other work quite matches.

The games industry is in a complicated moment. Many companies are downsizing or closing entire teams. People who never imagined themselves as founders suddenly put the idea on the table. It’s a mix of circumstance and curiosity. One door closes, another cracks open, and the question appears.

For anyone newly laid off, the months ahead can feel disorienting. Yet this is also when people do some of their best thinking. With the right mindset and the right partners, the idea of starting a studio goes from a defensive reaction to a deliberate choice. It can be the most rewarding decision of your career.

If you take the plunge, it will not be easy. Investors still see the potential of games but many struggle to read the business risk. Publishers behave the same way. Strong teams can succeed, though they now need a sharper pitch and a more grounded plan than ever before.

The Mindset Shift: From Developer to Founder

Most developers who start a studio underestimate how much their mindset needs to change. You step out of an environment with structure, pipelines, leadership layers, and institutional support. Overnight you become responsible for all of it.

I’ve seen this transition many times, both in my own journey and while evaluating studios as an investor. The people who struggle most are often the most experienced—they’ve spent years in large organizations where decisions moved through layers, where someone else watched the budget, where specialization was rewarded. None of that prepares you for a five-person team where everything is everyone’s problem.

“We need to check that with HQ” is often a death sentence to any game project. That one sentiment embodies so much of the inefficiency in our industry. It dilutes ownership and creates what I call a culture of waiting. In a small studio, no one else is coming to make the call. You are HQ.

The opposite looks like this: “That sounds interesting. Let’s implement it and try it at next week’s playtest.” Someone took an immediate decision and anchored it to validation. Fast and disciplined. That’s the rhythm a small studio needs to survive. Efficiency needs to become your unique selling point.

Another shift comes from understanding that creativity and business are no longer separate concerns. When I founded Massive Entertainment, none of us had run a company before. Our first game scored 86 on Metacritic—a genuine success by any creative measure. And not long after launch, we had to let go of two-thirds of our team because we had no funding plan for what came next. The game worked. The business nearly didn’t.

That experience taught me something I’ve carried ever since: watch the cash. Think beyond the project. The creative vision matters, but it doesn’t pay salaries when the runway runs out.

In short, you are building your company, as well as a game. Both need attention from day one.

Aligning With the Right Co-Founders

The founding team sets the tone for everything that follows: how decisions are made, how conflict is handled, how ambition is interpreted, and how the company evolves once things get difficult. Talent matters, but alignment matters more.

Starting with people you’ve worked with before is often a strength. You’ve seen each other under pressure, you understand each other’s habits, and investors appreciate teams with shared history. But familiarity isn’t enough. A founding team needs a mix of capabilities that covers the creative, technical, production, and commercial sides of the business. One person can cover several, but none can be ignored.

Just as important is clarity about who owns which decisions. At Planeto, my co-founder was the CTO—responsible for architecture, platform choices, and leading development. Creative and business strategy sat with me. We had tension occasionally, but we often resolved it quickly because we knew whose call it was. Without that clarity, small disagreements can become existential.

Ambition also needs to match. Some people dream of a five-person studio that runs sustainably for years. Others want to raise millions and chase global growth. Neither is wrong, but they are incompatible. Misaligned ambition is one of the most common sources of co-founder conflict I’ve seen—and it often doesn’t surface until the company is already underway. The same is true for creative direction. If the founders disagree about what kind of games the studio should make, that fracture will widen under pressure.

Finally, put it in writing. A shareholders’ agreement clarifies roles, voting rights, vesting, and what happens if someone leaves. Many founders avoid this conversation because it feels confrontational. In reality, it’s an act of respect. You’re aiming to build something profound together. Treat it with the care it deserves.

Strategy Before the First Game

Most founders begin with a game idea. The spark comes from a mechanic they want to explore, a genre they wish existed, or a frustration with how certain games are made. But anyone you pitch to—investors, publishers, or senior hires—will eventually ask the same question: what is the long-term plan?

During my time as an investor at Nordisk Games and Behold Ventures, we saw this pattern repeatedly. Talented teams would walk in with a compelling game concept and a clear funding ask. But when we asked about the company they wanted to build, most had no answer. They had a game pitch, not a company pitch. We often ended up passing, not because the games were weak, but because the teams hadn’t thought beyond their first project.

The teams that get it right talk differently: about subsequent projects, about what kind of games they want to excel at—not just “great games,” but a specific creative territory they intend to own. Their first game is one part of the deck, not the whole story.

This isn’t a corporate exercise. Strategy is a practical tool for early decisions. It shapes team composition, funding ambition, production scope, and how you position the studio in every conversation.

A clear strategy makes it much easier for potential partners to believe in you. It answers the question every investor is silently asking: why will this team still exist in five years?

Funding Reality and Level of Ambition

The funding environment for game studios has tightened considerably. Many investors still believe in the potential of games, yet hesitate because they find it difficult to assess risk in the current climate. Publishers face the same uncertainty. For new founders, this means two things: raising money takes longer than you expect, and the bar for clarity is higher than ever.

Most first-time founders underestimate the timeline. From deciding you want to start a studio to actually receiving funding can take a year or more—if it happens at all. That period requires savings, side work, or a very understanding family. Build that reality into your planning from the start.

Founders with well-known track records can still raise based on reputation. But most teams cannot rely on that. If you are senior but not a household name, your funding ambition needs to reflect where you’re starting from. You will earn trust step by step.

There are two broad funding paths: equity investment and project financing. Neither is inherently better, but they have different dynamics that founders often misunderstand.

Equity investors take an ownership stake and have a long-term interest in seeing the whole company succeed. But taking their money means you’re suddenly responsible for other people’s capital—not just to make a game, but to build a commercially successful business. You’re in the driver’s seat, but others will want to be included and involved. Experienced investors can be invaluable partners: they help with your funding journey, open doors, and share your long-term agenda. But they also expect significant returns. If you’re looking to build a lifestyle business—decent salaries for the founders, a sustainable but modest company—regular VC investors are the wrong fit. Your agendas will not just diverge, they will collide.

Project financing, typically from publishers, works differently. The publisher has no ownership stake, so their interest is narrower: can you deliver the game you’ve agreed on, on time, on budget? This can fund your first project if the production plan holds, but it doesn’t sustain any runway beyond that release. And critically, publisher deals often require giving up some or all of your IP rights, whereas equity funding lets you keep them—and IP is where most long-term value lies.

Whatever path you pursue, your tenacity and ability to tell a clear, persuasive story is essential. Fundraising is a sales process. Many developers have never needed that skill, but it becomes central when pitching your studio. Every meeting sharpens your message. Every rejection teaches you something. Your pitch should evolve constantly as you learn what resonates and what falls flat.

Raising money is challenging, but teams with clear strategies, grounded budgets, and focused prototypes increase their chances of success. The key is ambition that matches your reality and a willingness to refine your story until it lands.

Efficiency as Your Competitive Edge

New studios are almost always resource constrained. They win by moving with a level of speed and engagement that larger organizations struggle to match. A small team can react to the consequences of its decisions immediately. You can shift priorities without waiting for alignment processes or approval chains. That immediacy needs to become your momentum.

But efficiency isn’t only about size. When we made World in Conflict at Massive, the team grew from 30 to 130 people over two years. That’s not a small studio. Yet we shipped a game that scored 89 on Metacritic, on schedule. What made that possible was a core leadership team who had both the responsibility and the mandate to make decisions. We combined that with weekly playtesting that validated good ideas and weeded out bad ones at pace. The feedback loop stayed tight even as the team scaled.

Engagement plays a similar role. In a small studio, everyone sees how their work affects the whole. People take ownership because the impact is visible. This level of involvement is difficult to maintain in larger organizations where responsibility is distributed and teams operate in narrow lanes. Early studios thrive when every person feels accountable for the outcome, not just their slice of it.

A new studio has few natural advantages. Efficiency is the one you can control. The sooner you embrace that, the stronger your foundation becomes.

Build, Test, and Share Early

One of the most common mistakes founders make is waiting too long before putting something in front of others. The instinct is understandable. You want the pitch or prototype to feel representative. You want to avoid judgment until you’re ready. The problem is that waiting delays the information you need most.

An early prototype is a tool for learning. The sooner you build something playable, the sooner you see what players grasp immediately, what confuses them, and where the fun actually sits. None of this appears in internal conversations or design documents. It only shows up once people touch the game.

At Massive, we eventually learned to playtest constantly. The feedback was often difficult to hear, but always valuable. We didn’t look for praise or solutions. We wanted to know what wasn’t working. Playtesters surface the problems; your creativity and experience figure out the fixes.

The same principle applies to pitching your studio. No one is going to steal your idea. Sharing your concept widely forces you to articulate it clearly. It also increases your chances of finding collaborators, publishers, or investors. Fundraising is a numbers game. You will need dozens, or sometimes hundreds, of conversations before someone commits. Each meeting is an opportunity to sharpen your pitch.

Early studios gain momentum by building something, testing it, showing it, and repeating the cycle relentlessly. The clarity you gain will guide your decisions far more reliably than speculation or internal debate.

Take the Plunge

Starting a studio is a huge commitment. It asks for energy, patience, and a willingness to learn at a pace that can feel relentless. Progress will feel fragile at times, even for the strongest teams. Yet people still do it, and many look back on those early years as the most meaningful work of their careers.

I count myself among them. The years building Massive and Planeto—despite the near-bankruptcy, despite the layoffs, despite all the moments I was worried we’d fail—remain the most formative of my professional life. Everything mattered. Every decision had significance. Every person counted. That intensity is hard to find inside a large organization.

There is no perfect moment to begin. Circumstances rarely line up neatly. What matters is whether you have people you trust, a strategy that gets you excited, and a mindset that allows you to handle the uncertainty ahead.

To be clear, this essay is far from comprehensive. Starting a studio involves much more than any short piece can cover: legal structures, team building, production methodologies, market positioning, and a hundred other things you’ll learn along the way. But hopefully these reflections spark some inspiration and curiosity.

Even if the journey doesn’t end the way you hope, you will come out stronger. You learn how companies work. You learn how games are built without the safety net of a large organization. You learn how to pitch, how to prioritize, and how to make decisions that ripple across an entire team. Those lessons stay with you, and they open doors you didn’t expect.

If you feel the pull toward starting something, take it seriously. Explore it carefully. And if the pieces align, take the plunge. I hope it becomes the most rewarding chapter of your professional life. 😊

This essay is part of my ongoing series, Connecting the Pixels, where I explore how technology, creativity, and culture intersect in the future of interactive entertainment.

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• The industry’s recent layoffs have revealed how fragile studio structures become when costs rise and markets tighten.

• The Indie Inside Manifesto offers a novel way for studios to retain capability and talent when financial pressure demands cost reductions.

• The model: developers can shift to 60 percent employment and use the remaining time for their own projects, with full IP ownership.

• For developers, Indie Inside provides a safe way to explore personal ideas without quitting their job or betting their savings.

• Studios gain a more flexible organisation, keep talent attached, and can scale up when needed without crunch.

• Indie Inside is not charity or a perk, but a practical response to a shifting industry facing its hardest transformation in years.

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Over the past two years, I’ve laid off more than 300 people. “Right-sizing” and “streamlining,” as the consultants call it. These were necessary decisions made to keep the company alive. But it was painful for everyone.

Across the industry, teams have been reduced, departments have closed, and studios have folded. Behind each announcement sits the same story: companies realising that the last decade’s expansion built more weight than the current market could carry.

The people leaving aren’t less talented than they were a month earlier. Their passion for making games doesn’t vanish because the market shifts. Yet we’ve created a system where creative talent is hired aggressively in good years and released just as aggressively when conditions tighten.

Being in the middle of that turmoil, I found myself returning to an idea I wrote almost a decade ago—an idea that might have been premature then, but feels increasingly relevant now. It offered a way for studios to stay resilient during downturns, and a way for developers to explore ideas without risking their savings.

Indies on the inside

Ten years ago, I drafted a short manifesto—Indie Inside—about how established studios could support indie development. The idea felt a little utopian at the time. Most companies were growing and the industry didn’t feel any urgency to rethink how people made games or how studios structured their teams.

The premise was simple: employees could choose to work 60 percent at their studio and 40 percent on their own projects. Their indie work would be fully theirs—creatively and commercially—and the company would adjust their contract accordingly. A structured, sanctioned way of exploring ideas without quitting your job or compromising your financial stability.

Today, Indie Inside no longer feels utopian. It feels like a way to be lean without losing people. A way to protect the skills the industry keeps investing in, then discards when things tighten. A way to let developers explore ideas that might never find space inside a traditional roadmap.

Why Now

The industry has always cycled between growth and correction, but the past two years have exposed something deeper than a temporary downturn. We’ve built organisations that are excellent at shipping large games and terrible at handling uncertainty.

At the same time, the creative centre of gravity is shifting. Small teams have shown how much can be done with the right mix of experience, technology, and focus. The distance between a two-person prototype and a commercially viable release has never been shorter. Yet many of the people best positioned to take that leap never do, because the personal risk is too high.

This is the tension the industry now faces. Companies need flexibility, and developers need room to explore. Neither gets what they need from the current model.

Indie Inside sits in that gap. It gives companies a way to adjust costs without severing relationships, and it gives developers a structured space to test their ideas. Instead of losing people entirely, a studio keeps them working, engaged, and available. And a developer can experiment while maintaining personal stability.

There is also a larger ecosystem effect. When experienced developers start small projects of their own, they broaden the creative landscape. Most of those projects will fail, but a few will turn into serious businesses. And all of them expand the industry’s capacity to take creative risks at a time when larger companies are more cautious than ever.

The Corporate Case: Flexibility & Capability

As counterintuitive as it may seem at first glance, the appeal of Indie Inside for game companies begins with something crucial: flexibility. Studios spend years hiring talented people, building specialised teams, and developing internal knowledge. When markets tighten, that investment disappears with redundancies. The company saves money, but it also loses capability, culture, and hard-won experience.

Indie Inside changes that adjustment. Instead of ending relationships, a company can lower payroll costs while keeping its people involved in the work they know. A team with several developers on Indie Time may run, say, at an average 80 percent capacity most of the year. This gives the organisation room to scale up when needed, asking part-timers to return to full-time for a period, without resorting to crunch or scrambling for contractors who lack context. In practice, this creates a more predictable and resilient production organisation, not a weaker one.

There’s also a talent attraction dimension. Indie Inside appeals to experienced, self-driven developers who want both meaningful studio work and the freedom to build something of their own. It turns the studio into a place where ambitious creatives can grow in multiple directions, not just one.

Furthermore, when people pursue side projects, they learn skills and take responsibility outside their narrow discipline. Designers think more about production. Programmers think about asset creation. Artists think about timelines and budgets. These experiences flow back into their main work, making developers more capable collaborators.

Finally, there is the simple commercial opportunity: some indie projects succeed. Most don’t, but a few will show real potential. A company that already knows the creators, understands their strengths, and believes in their judgment is in a natural position to invest, publish, or partner. Indie Inside becomes a quiet incubator, producing opportunities that would never have emerged inside a tightly planned development pipeline.

None of these benefits require a company to be altruistic. They follow straightforward operational logic, and they align with the long-term interests of both the organisation and its people.

The Developer Case: Room to Explore

The desire to create something personal is common in our industry, but the cost of pursuing it is high. Leaving a stable job to build an indie game is a full-risk decision for an individual or a small founding team. You burn your savings. You lose your routine. You step out of the context that gave you confidence.

Indie Inside removes the binary choice. Instead of “stay employed or jump into the unknown,” developers get a middle path: room to explore an idea without betting their entire career on it. They keep their colleagues, their stability, their connection to the industry, and most of their salary. If the project has potential, they can push it further. If it doesn’t, they return to full-time work without having derailed their lives. People who would never take a full leap can suddenly explore what they’re capable of.

And the learning is real. Small projects force you to confront every part of development. You discover the gaps in your knowledge, and you gain a different kind of ownership over your craft. That experience also flows back into your main work, regardless of whether the indie attempt ultimately succeeded or failed.

What It Looks Like in Practice

Indie Inside only works if it’s practical. The idea sounds idealistic, but the implementation is straightforward. Studios already handle a steady flow of scheduling adjustments: vacations, parental leave, sick leave, onboarding, departures, promotions, and the reality of people splitting time across multiple projects. Adding Indie Time to that mix is just another variable in a system that already adapts constantly.

For it to work, we need alignment. People on Indie Time should be off on the same days each week. Teams can plan around a predictable rhythm, and the organisation knows exactly where it can scale up in critical situations, by asking employees on Indie Time to come back to full-time for a defined period, when a project genuinely needs the extra hands.

To be clear, Indie Time isn’t a perk. It comes with a 40 percent pay cut. It’s a choice. And because it’s open to everyone, there’s no built-in unfairness. The main point is simple: this isn’t a radical experiment in flexible work. It’s a structured, predictable arrangement that slots into how studios already operate.

The Difficult Questions

Of course, every idea that touches team structure, money, and creative ambition brings a set of hard questions. Indie Inside is no exception. Let’s step through a few of the potential concerns.

Will people save their best ideas for their indie project?
Some leaders worry that employees will give the company their leftovers. It’s a reasonable concern, but creativity doesn’t work like that. People don’t ration inspiration, and many already have small ideas or side projects they explore at home. If someone is genuinely disengaged from their day job, the issue isn’t the side project, it’s the day job.

Will only senior developers make use of it?
Possibly. Seniors and financially secure employees are more likely to try Indie Time. But that’s a reflection of how risk works in real life. Juniors still benefit: when seniors shift to 60 percent, space opens up. They can take on responsibilities they wouldn’t otherwise get, and they grow faster. And because Indie Time is open to everyone, there’s no structural inequity built into the model.

Will it create managerial friction?
Absolutely. Any change does. But production teams already manage constant shifts in staffing and capacity. Indie Time adds another variable, not a new category of complexity. The solution is discipline: aligned schedules, predictable days, and a clean transition into the 60 percent mode.

Will the studio deliver less when some people work at 60 percent?
Yes. A team running below full capacity will produce less in steady state. But the predictability matters: you know exactly where the gaps are, and you gain the ability to scale up when needed by asking Indie Time developers to return temporarily to full-time. That flexibility is often more valuable than maintaining a fragile 100 percent on paper. It helps avoid crunch, preserves project knowledge, and keeps capability inside the studio rather than risk losing it entirely.

Is Indie Inside a fit for every situation?
No. Some companies face structural or financial pressures that require deeper changes— closing teams or cancelling projects. That was my recent situation. In those cases, reducing individual capacity doesn’t solve the underlying problem. Indie Inside is designed for studios that still believe in their long-term capability and want to preserve it, even in tighter conditions.

Could Indie Inside become a cost-cutting tactic?
It may be seen that way, especially in a pressured market, but the model only works if it remains voluntary. A company can’t push people into Indie Time. And even if a studio introduces it during a downturn partly as a cost-saving tool, the outcome is still better than losing people entirely.

Is it legally complicated?
In some jurisdictions, maybe. But none of the core principles violate standard employment structures. It’s simply a part-time arrangement, paired with a clear agreement about intellectual property. Most of the perceived risk is cultural rather than legal.

The Indie Inside Manifesto

To make this as concrete as possible, here’s an updated 2025 version of my original manifesto:

We, the Indie Inside companies, believe that everyone thrives when developers have room to explore ideas both inside and outside their regular work. We commit to a flexible model that supports our internal projects while giving employees a stable and realistic way to pursue personal ones. Indie Inside is built on a simple idea: people and studios succeed when talented developers feel trusted, motivated, and able to grow in more than one dimension.

Our commitments and expectations:

1. Voluntary reduced-time employment
   Any full-time employee may request to shift to 60 percent employment, with salary adjusted accordingly. The move will be planned with each team to avoid unnecessary disruption, so timing may vary, but we commit to making the shift in a timely manner.

2. Focus during studio hours
   Employees on Indie Time commit to giving their full focus and engagement to studio work during their 60 percent schedule.

3. Protected time for personal projects
   The remaining 40 percent is the employee’s independent project time. The studio will not assign work, interrupt, or schedule meetings during those hours.

4. Clear scheduling
   Employees on Indie Time align their days off, giving teams predictable rhythms and allowing the studio to plan reliably.

5. Temporary scaling when needed
   If a project enters a critical phase, the studio may ask Indie Time employees to return to full-time for a defined period. This is fully compensated, and time-bound.

6. Full ownership of independent work
   Projects created during Indie Time belong entirely to the employee, provided they do not directly compete with the studio’s active products or confidential work. Clear IP boundaries are documented at the start of Indie Time participation.

7. Optional first-look for investment
   If an Indie Inside project seeks external investment or publishing partners, the studio may request a first conversation to explore involvement. Any potential such partnership must be mutually agreed and on fair commercial terms.

8. Basic equipment access
   Employees may use standard company hardware (computers, phones) for Indie Time, subject to a written IP waiver, as long as it does not affect daily operations. Proprietary tools require explicit permission.

9. Path back to full-time
   Employees who wish to return to full-time will be accommodated whenever reasonably possible.

10. Open eligibility
    Indie Time is accessible to all employees regardless of seniority. Participation is a choice, not a privilege.

Closing

I’m not presenting Indie Inside as a silver bullet or a moral obligation. It’s simply a novel way to navigate a moment when the industry feels both overbuilt and under-supported, and when too many good developers are left without a clear path forward.

I’ve seen how quickly organisations lose engagement and capability when headcount drops. I’ve also seen how much people can grow when they have the space to try something of their own. Indie Inside meets those two realities in the middle. It gives flexibility to studios and keeps developers connected to the work they know, while giving them a fair chance to build something that might not fit inside a large production pipeline.

The industry will keep changing, with or without us. Indie Inside is one way to adapt with a bit more flexibility, a bit more resilience, and a bit more care for the people who make the work possible.

This essay is part of my ongoing series, Connecting the Pixels, where I explore how technology, creativity, and culture intersect in the future of interactive entertainment.

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• Game startups and tech startups operate on different foundations. Tech builds painkillers that can be tested and verified early; games are pleasure providers whose value appears after all the work is done.

• Most investors are geared toward funding painkillers, not pleasure providers. They’re used to verifying problems and solutions, not predicting whether a creative idea will resonate years from now.

• Studios create value over multiple titles. The first game often doesn’t carry the company; the upside appears only if the team survives long enough to ship several projects.

• Founders who plan for this reality raise more effectively. A clear strategy, early playtesting, lean production, multi-title funding plans, and battle-tested teams all help reduce ambiguity in the pitch.

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“We need to raise funding for our game studio, but almost no one wants to take a meeting with us. Help!”

I’ve heard versions of this countless times in the past few years. Teams with real experience, a credible plan, and a clear pitch still find themselves shut out before the conversation even begins.

The reality is that funding is hard for almost everyone right now. Even solid tech startups get pushed into longer diligence cycles. Investors ask more questions, take fewer risks, and expect sharper proof points.

But for game studio founders, the challenge runs deeper. Their struggle isn’t only about the market turning cautious. It’s about a structural mismatch between how games are made and how most venture capital investors are trained to evaluate early-stage bets. That gap becomes painfully visible in a tight funding climate.

Two Startup Species

To understand why game studios struggle to raise money, you have to start with a simple truth: tech startups and game startups operate on entirely different foundations. One solves problems, the painkillers. The other creates entertainment, the pleasure providers. That difference shapes everything that follows.

Tech founders begin with a problem that investors can understand, verify, and sometimes even relate to personally. Within weeks or months, founders can often produce a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that shows whether the idea has legs. Even if only ten percent of the problem is solved, the value is already visible. A crude prototype can be enough to prove demand.

This gives tech investors a clear path: verify the problem, assess the solution, and fund just enough to confirm the hypothesis, step by step.

Game studios don’t get that luxury. A game must ultimately be entertaining, and half a game is not half as fun, it’s not fun at all. The value only shows up after substantial creative and production work. By then, most of the investment is gone.

This removes the signals many investors rely on to gain conviction at the early stage. There’s no MVP that meaningfully de-risks a new game. There’s no spreadsheet that reveals whether a new idea will catch on. There’s only a creative pitch, a direction, and a team that believes it can get there.

The only real validation in games comes from external playtesting, but most teams aren’t ready for that when they need their first funding round. In a hot market, investors might still take the bet. In a cautious one, they default to the patterns they know, and those patterns don’t apply to games.

Game Infrastructure vs. Content

There’s an important distinction that often gets lost in these conversations. Not all “gaming startups” face the same headwinds. Tools, platforms, infrastructure, monetization systems—the tech layer of the industry—continue to attract capital even in a cautious market.

These companies are solving verifiable problems. Investors understand those dynamics. They can see the pain, and they can see whether the solution actually solves it. That puts gaming tech squarely in the painkiller category.

In a climate where every investment committee wants clean logic and defensible assumptions, pleasure-providing startups are an uncomfortable fit. They simply operate under a different investment logic.

This is also why most investors fall into two camps: those who specialize in gaming, and those who avoid it entirely. Very few sit in the middle. That split becomes even sharper in cautious markets.

Value Emerges Over Multiple Games

Another factor often missed in early-stage investment conversations is how value actually forms inside a game studio. A tech company can create meaningful equity with its first product or service. If the MVP works and the early metrics look promising, investors can already see the outlines of highly scalable revenue.

A game studio rarely works that way. The first title often doesn’t carry the company. The real value, if it comes, tends to appear on the second or third project, after the team has learned how to work together, sharpened its instincts, and built creative alignment.

That makes early equity funding a very particular type of bet. Investors aren’t backing a single game; they’re backing the team’s ability to survive long enough to make several. The real upside appears only if the studio gets through the early turbulence and becomes a repeat creator of successful games.

Survival to that point usually comes from a mix of follow-on funding, moderate revenue from game one, and a studio that learns to operate lean enough to keep building even when finances are strained.

This reality makes funding even more difficult in cautious markets. Raising enough for one game is hard. Raising enough to survive to the next one is harder. And without a clear path-to-funding across multiple titles, many otherwise promising pitches fall apart before they reach a term sheet.

Navigating the Terrain

The point of all this isn’t to paint a bleak picture. Game studios aren’t unfundable. They’re simply evaluated through a different lens. Investors can’t validate a game the way they validate a SaaS product, so founders need to give them something else to hold on to:

• A clear long-term strategy: Founders who know what kind of studio they’re trying to build signal intent and direction. This is about creative ambition, audience focus, and the kind of business they want to create over time.

• A clear path-to-funding across multiple titles: Investors want to understand not just how you’ll build the first game, but how you plan to fund and build the second and third without folding.

• Early and continuous playtesting: External feedback is the closest thing games have to early traction; it shows the team can find the fun before burn consumes the runway.

• Lean production: The studios that survive learn to minimize waste and reach meaningful insights quickly, even with small teams.

• A team that has built something together before: Previous collaboration reduces one of the biggest unknowns in game development: team fit under pressure.

Good studios do get funded, even now. They treat the first game as a stepping stone, not a lottery ticket. They have a strategy that shows investors how the company becomes more capable and valuable as it goes. And they propose creative ideas that can be implemented efficiently and tested early.

It also helps to approach the right investors. Gaming tends to be a specialization. The people who understand creative risk usually understand it because they’ve funded multiple studios before.

This won’t guarantee funding, but it will give you a far better chance of reaching the conversations that matter.

This essay is part of my ongoing series, Connecting the Pixels, where I explore how technology, creativity, and culture intersect in the future of interactive entertainment.

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• Games remain one of the least convenient forms of entertainment. What takes seconds on Netflix or YouTube can take an hour on PC or console.

• The industry’s culture, not its technology, keeps convenience from improving. We design for people who already know how to play.

• Every moment of friction loses players. Four in ten American adults don’t play games—but not because they lack access. The next billion players won’t join unless games are easier to find, start, and return to.

• Cloud gaming could offer the next leap in convenience, but only if paired with content and design that welcomes new players.

• Convenience isn’t anti-creative. It’s what allows creativity to reach people. The companies that master it will shape the future of play.

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As I wrap up my tenure as CEO of Thunderful Group, I’ve finally had a bit more time to play. A few nights ago I tried to play Battlefield 6 RedSec, the new free-to-play shooter. It took more than an hour before I even reached the title screen: downloading the game, installing Windows updates, updating Nvidia drivers. When it finally launched, I stared at a black screen for twenty seconds, then another minute of “compiling shaders.” A technical setup followed, then a series of dramatic but meaningless videos, before I landed in a start menu so cluttered it felt like a cockpit checklist.

I’m used to this. Most players are. We’ve learned to accept that friction is part of gaming. But step back for a moment: what other form of entertainment asks this much effort before it begins?

If you open Spotify, you’re listening to something in seconds. YouTube loads faster than your mind changes. Games, in contrast, still behave like software from another era: intricate and a little arrogant in how much they demand from you.

We’ve grown up in an industry built by people who don’t mind fiddling with settings, downloading patches, and understanding why shaders compile. For most of us, the friction is invisible because we’ve internalized it. But for anyone outside that circle—especially the billions who don’t play yet—it’s a wall.

Searching for Convenience

The last real convenience moment in games happened more than fifteen years ago. Mobile touchscreens and the app stores made it effortless to start playing. You saw a game, tapped a button, and seconds later you were in. No boxes, no drivers, no setup. For a brief moment, games felt as accessible as music or film.

But mobile convenience didn’t spread to the rest of the industry. The reason isn’t technical—it’s cultural. The people who build games already find them convenient enough. We entered the industry through a love of depth; games that reward skill, patience, and problem-solving. That mindset provided incredible experiences, but also an echo chamber. We design too much for people like ourselves, not for the ones still on the outside looking in.

Granted, not every game should chase convenience. Some experiences are meant to be demanding, difficult, or intentionally inconvenient, and that’s part of their appeal. But we’ve let that mindset bleed into almost everything, designing for experts where we don’t have to.

Other industries learned this lesson long ago. In the early 1900s, grocery stores kept customers behind a counter while clerks fetched the goods. Then came the self-service model—the convenience store— which turned access itself into innovation. These days, Amazon has made shopping nearly frictionless: one click, next-day delivery. Netflix has us watching in seconds. YouTube is the same for short-form video, and Uber for getting across town.

Convenience has become a competitive art form everywhere but in games. We celebrate creative ambition, technology, and spectacle—but rarely discuss how to make playing effortless. If you map the industry onto a standard adoption curve, most PC and console games still target innovators and early adopters: people who don’t mind complexity. To keep growing, we need to reach the early and late majority—players who just want to play.

The irony is that our tools have never been better suited for frictionless experiences. Cloud gaming, cross-platform accounts, seamless payments—they’re all here. Tech companies have spent decades removing friction: “one click,” “tap to play,” “no setup required”.

Meanwhile, what we call “depth” is often just unnecessary complexity. For some players, this complexity feels empowering and elite. For everyone else, it’s a locked door. It’s time we unlock that door.

The High Cost of Inconvenience

In the United States, roughly sixty percent of adults play video games. That’s impressive, until you flip the number around. Four in ten do not. This is one of the most connected and affluent markets in the world—where almost everyone owns a screen, has broadband, and streams video daily. Access isn’t the barrier.

Games ask for time, effort, and attention before they offer fun. They need accounts, downloads, updates, settings, and onboarding. Many still ask for considerable money upfront, adding financial risk to the time investment. Too many people simply opt for something easier.

All of this leads to slowing growth, rising acquisition costs, and increasingly fierce competition over the same limited pool of experienced players. Convenience isn’t a luxury—it’s the growth strategy that will determine how we capture the next billion people.

Steam, Unpowered

No platform illustrates the problem better than Steam. It’s a marvel of scale and infrastructure, yet its user experience still assumes deep familiarity. Pages are dense with options, pop-ups, and jargon. Even buying a game can feel like managing a software deployment. Steam has become the standard for PC gaming, but also the clearest example of how the industry’s best tools often serve experts first.

Consoles do a little better, but not by much. Their stores are cleaner, yet updates, patches, and online license checks still interrupt the flow. Even “instant play” titles often require gigabytes of downloads before anything actually starts.

When I launched Battlefield 6 RedSec, I hoped for an instant free-to-play experience. What I got was a technical obstacle course. Twenty years ago, I wouldn’t have minded, but today I don’t have the patience.

This isn’t about singling out platforms or developers. It’s a reflection of a culture that still treats the path to play as a secondary concern. Other forms of entertainment have learned the obvious lesson: the easier something is to start, the more people it attracts.

The Cloud Gaming Promise

If the last big leap in convenience came from mobile, the next might come from the cloud. Cloud gaming isn’t just a new technology and distribution channel; it promises to be the purest expression of convenience the medium has ever seen.

The major players are betting heavily on it. Microsoft’s xCloud, Amazon’s Luna, and also Netflix, represent massive infrastructure investments in a clear vision: make games as accessible as video streaming. See it, click it, play it instantly on any device.

Unfortunately, in practice, today’s cloud services still fall short. You still bounce through logins, clunky hubs, and authentication checks. Cloud gaming today is more convenient than traditional installs, but it hasn’t reached the frictionless experience it advertises.

If that promise is fully realized, it changes everything. No downloads, no updates, no hardware requirements. True “click and play” for a billion people who’ve never installed Steam.

The promise is clear, yet getting there requires more than technology. Google’s Stadia had competent streaming, but targeted hardcore players—not the audience most keen on effortless access. The technology wasn’t the main problem; the strategy was. It was like inventing the microwave, then marketing it to chefs.

But here’s what matters most: the distribution innovation only unlocks massive growth if paired with content innovation. Cloud removes friction from access, but it can’t remove friction inside the game. Outside of the intentionally hardcore games, we need to create experiences with better onboarding, shorter time-to-fun, and designs that respect players who might step away for weeks and come back without remembering the control schemes.

Convenience here is a mindset. It’s about providing experiences where curiosity instantly turns into play, without requiring patience or prior expertise. That’s how we reach the players still waiting for their first “click and play” moment.

Putting Convenience on the Agenda

Convenience doesn’t sound glamorous. But it might be the most underused competitive edge in modern games. The industry spends billions chasing innovation in content and technology, while the path to play remains stuck in the past.

That can change. It starts with naming the problem. Imagine if every creative review, every publishing roadmap, and every executive strategy included one question: is this convenient for players? If the answer is no, fix it.

To be clear, convenience isn’t the opposite of creativity, it’s what allows creativity to be experienced. It’s time to flip our mindset: make convenience a design discipline, a strategic pillar, and even a cultural value. A great story, world, or mechanic means nothing if players never understand how to get in—or struggle to make it past the first five minutes.

I never did enjoy Battlefield 6 RedSec that night. After an hour of setup, I played one round, quit, and opened HBO Max instead. I’m someone who’s spent thirty years in this industry, someone who helped build games that millions played. If the path to play loses me, what chance does it have with someone who’s never fired up Steam?

This essay is part of my ongoing series, Connecting the Pixels, where I explore how technology, creativity, and culture intersect in the future of interactive entertainment.

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• Everyone in games talks about innovation, but rarely with intent or clarity.

• We shouldn’t expect innovation to come from chaos or luck; it’s a strategic choice about where to be bold and where to stay conventional.

• This essay introduces five dimensions of innovation—Content, Technology, Distribution, Marketing, and Process—as a framework for creative focus.

• Through a fictional case study, Silverfox Interactive, we explore how clear choices turn innovation from chance into intent.

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Innovation, the Fuzziest Word in Games

Few words are as celebrated—and misused—in the games industry as innovation. Most teams want to be innovative. The industry was built on that impulse, but innovation is hard to plan for and harder to manage. Too often we treat it as a desired outcome rather than a deliberate strategic decision.

That realization crystallized for me after listening to an interesting episode of Gamecraft called Cycles & Survival, where the hosts discussed how the industry tends to innovate across three dimensions: Content, Technology, and Distribution. It’s an insightful framework, but I believe that two more innovation dimensions should be added to the mix: Marketing and Process.

Taken together, these five dimensions form a holistic framework of how our industry evolves. Innovation strategy means deciding where to be bold and where to stay conventional. Aligning creativity, production, and investment risk around clear choices.

The Need for a Framework

The industry talks about innovation as if it’s something you can summon with passion or force. But in practice, innovation is uneven. Many succeed by accident rather than intent. Not because teams lack creativity, but because they rarely commit to where they intend to innovate. Trying to be original in every area quickly leads to confusion, delay, and unmanageable risk.

A framework forces clarity. It helps companies decide, from the outset, which dimensions deserve experimentation and which should follow convention. It aligns designers, producers, and investors around the same logic of intentionally risk-balanced creativity.

In other words, success in games is never about chasing innovation everywhere. It’s about focusing it where it counts.

The Five Dimensions of Innovation

Every major leap in the games industry can be traced back to innovation in one or more of the five dimensions: Content, Technology, Distribution, Marketing and Process. In reality, they’re all interconnected, and sometimes overlapping, but let’s look at them one by one.

1. Content Innovation — What We Create

Content innovation is the beating heart of the industry, and often what we first think about when we talk about innovation in games. It’s about designing and producing games and IPs that feel new, that capture attention and emotion in a fresh way.

From Tetris and Super Mario to Doom, World of Warcraft, Minecraft, PUBG, and Candy Crush, every era-defining hit has reimagined how players engage. Today, developers continue that tradition by blending genres to create experiences that challenge what players expect from familiar ideas.

Innovation in content is about choosing your creative battles; deciding what truly needs to be new, and what simply needs to be good. When that balance is deliberate, creativity and focus reinforce each other.

2. Technology Innovation — Expanding the Possibility Space

Technology is the foundation that expands what games can be. Every major shift in our medium—from 2D to 3D, offline to online, touchscreens to VR—began with a new layer of technological possibility.

Right now, we stand at another technological turning point. Generative AI and creation tools like Unreal Engine 5 and Unity Muse are reshaping how ideas move from concept to reality. Creating concept art, environments, or dialogue now takes hours instead of weeks. Meanwhile, tools like NVIDIA ACE hint at how characters themselves may soon respond dynamically. These technologies don’t just boost productivity, they help expand imagination.

Great game companies don’t chase every emerging technology. Instead, they deliberately assess which advances genuinely unlock meaningful creative or commercial potential for their specific strategy.

3. Distribution Innovation — How We Reach and Monetize Players

Distribution innovation is about new ways of getting games into players’ hands—and money into publishers’. Each major shift has transformed both how we play and what we play. Shareware helped Doom reach millions of PCs; digital storefronts opened the door for indie creators through Steam and Itch.io; and mobile app stores turned casual hits like Angry Birds and Candy Crush into global phenomena. When friction goes down, markets open up. When access broadens, new genres and audiences emerge.

The next wave of distribution innovation may not be about inventing new delivery technologies at all—it might be about convenience: removing friction through cloud streaming, simpler UX, and platform-agnostic access.

At the same time, platforms like Roblox and Fortnite point toward a different frontier, where distribution and creation merge. Players don’t just buy games; they make and share them within the same ecosystem.

4. Marketing Innovation — How We Attract and Connect

Game marketing evolved from broadcasting messages to building relationships. Early publishers relied on mass media and mascots (Mario, Crash Bandicoot); later came influencers, community storytelling, and developer diaries.

Today, the most effective marketing often doesn’t feel like marketing at all. It’s the developers themselves sharing progress, challenges, and personality—like Larian’s candid updates or CD Projekt Red’s post-launch transparency. It’s creators who engage authentically on social media, and studios who open their doors through playtests and Early Access. Even large franchises experiment with cultural crossovers, like concerts in Fortnite, blurring the line between community and spectacle.

Marketing innovation isn’t about shouting louder; it’s about inviting players closer. The most effective campaigns turn awareness into engagement.

5. Process Innovation — Redefining How We Work

Process innovation is the invisible layer that ties everything together. It’s not about what we make or where we sell it, but how we lead, ideate, organize and operate to turn creativity into reality. In many ways, it’s the dimension that catalyses all the others.

From agile development and continuous playtesting to hybrid studio models and AI-assisted workflows, process innovation is focused squarely on accelerating creativity and efficiency.

Unfortunately, process is rarely talked about as an area of innovation in our industry, but it can be incredibly powerful behind the scenes. I highly recommend reading Creativity Inc., by Ed Catmull, co-founder and former President of Pixar, to understand how process innovation helped transform an entire creative industry.

As such, the best studios treat process as a creative discipline—experimenting with how decisions are made, how feedback flows, and how failure informs the next iteration. Innovation grows from clear intent, supported by systems that make space for exploration and learning.

In short, process innovation here is the art of designing organisations that make innovation intentional, efficient, and valued, driving both artistic and commercial success.

How to Apply It — Choosing Where to Be Bold

Innovation can happen by accident, but that’s a dangerous strategy to apply—hoping for providence. Innovation should happen by teams making deliberate choices about where to innovate and where to stay conventional.

When a team defines its innovation focus at the start—across Content, Technology, Distribution, Marketing, or Process—it turns ambiguity into alignment. Everyone knows where to explore new ideas, and where to build conventional solutions. They can take deliberate risks where it really makes a difference.

Deciding that balance early on is incredibly liberating. It allows everyone to focus their creative energy where it matters most. The less energy wasted on uncertainty, the more time there is for true invention.

Innovation in Practice — A Fictional Case Study

To make this framework tangible, let’s work through a fictional example. Imagine we’ve just founded a new studio called Silverfox Interactive, SiFI. Our strategy: to create action-packed games for players aged 40 and above. We’re building for the veterans of gaming, the ones who grew up on Doom and Half-Life, but whose reflexes and schedules no longer match today’s competitive pace.

We’ve raised five million dollars to develop our first game—a first-person shooter designed for a slower audience. Not necessarily easier, but more deliberate: tactical combat, smart pacing, and mechanics that reward thought and awareness over speed. The team has two years to take it from concept to launch. Tight budget, tight timeline.

How should SiFI apply its creativity across Content, Technology, Distribution, Marketing, and Process to give itself the best chance of success?

Content Innovation—Designing for the Audience

The team’s core bet isn’t about genre or technology—it’s about who the game is for. Veterans of Doom and Half-Life who still love the intensity of action games, but prefer a more deliberate rhythm—tactical choices over twitch reactions.

That’s where the content innovation needs to happen: in the second-to-second and minute-to-minute game mechanics. Combat feels physical and grounded, emphasizing positioning, awareness, and resource management rather than raw speed.

Everywhere else, SiFI stays deliberately conventional. The chosen setting—cops versus criminals—is instantly familiar, like Payday or Counter-Strike. They even consider licensing an existing IP to lower narrative and marketing risk. Either way, it doesn’t require the team to invent a new universe or lore, and players instantly know what kind of world they’re stepping into.

The control scheme follows the same logic. Traditional FPS inputs remain, adjusted only where needed to match the pacing. The aim is refinement, not reinvention—simplifying where possible, to cater for players returning to the genre after years away.

By narrowing their innovation to experience design rather than worldbuilding or storytelling, SiFI directs its creative energy where it matters most. The result is a clear identity, manageable risk, and a sharper promise to its audience: a shooter built for grown-ups.

Technology Innovation — Reliability Over Reinvention

When it comes to technology, SiFI keeps things simple. Unreal Engine is the obvious choice: battle-tested, shooter-friendly, and supported by an ecosystem that makes production efficient.

The goal isn’t to push visual fidelity to its limits, but to reach as many players as possible with a stable, polished experience. It’s designed to run smoothly on a wide range of PCs and consoles, ensuring that accessibility doesn’t stop at the gameplay.

There is, however, one deliberate unconventional strategic decision: SiFI commits early to supporting Apple Silicon Macs. Many players in their target demographic use Macs for both work and leisure, and offering a seamless experience there instantly differentiates the game.

By choosing reliability and breadth over reinvention, SiFI’s technology strategy keeps risk low, efficiency high, and development focused on what really matters.

Distribution Innovation — Preparing for the Cloud

For Silverfox Interactive, distribution starts conventionally. The game will launch through the established PC and console platforms—Steam, PlayStation, Xbox—because that’s where the infrastructure, audience, and trust already exist.

But the studio makes one forward-looking decision: they believe cloud gaming will eventually fulfill its promise of true accessibility. Unlike fast-twitch competitive shooters, SiFI’s slower, more deliberate pacing makes it far more resilient to latency. In other words, this game is cloud-ready by design.

That opens an entirely new door. Cloud distribution could make the game playable anywhere—on laptops and work machines—for battles during office lunch breaks. For an older audience that values convenience and flexibility over performance tinkering, that’s a perfect fit.

So while SiFI’s first release will ship through traditional platforms, its team quietly builds for the next frontier. They’re not betting the studio on cloud gaming, but they’re making sure they’ll be ready when it arrives.

Marketing Innovation — Building in Public

The studio decides early on not to self-publish. Starting a company and creating a game from scratch is challenge enough; building a publishing arm on top would stretch both focus and capital. Instead, SiFI looks for a publishing partner—someone who believes in the project strongly enough to co-invest and share the risk.

But SiFI does innovate in how it communicates. From the first months of development, the studio starts talking openly about the project—sharing its journey through developer diaries, weekly video updates, and short-form content. Thoughtful reflections on the challenges of designing for a different audience.

By building in public, SiFI invites its target players into the process. For a demographic often overlooked by most modern shooters, that sense of inclusion builds both trust and anticipation. It’s a simple insight: the more you involve your audience in shaping the game, the less you have to sell it later. Authenticity becomes the marketing strategy.

Process Innovation — Learning Through Play

With a team of fewer than twenty people, SiFI doesn’t need elaborate processes or layered management. Everyone on the team is experienced, and the production model is straightforward: small, senior, and focused. The innovation comes not from reinventing workflows, but from how the team validates its ideas.

Less than three months from project inception, the game is playable, barely, and SiFI begins weekly playtests with external testers. It’s rough, often embarrassingly so, but that’s the point. Each session delivers direct, actionable feedback. Design theories are tested, adjusted, or discarded in real time.

These weekly touchpoints with reality keep the game honest. They help the team separate what feels right from what merely sounds right in a design meeting. The discipline of continuous playtesting turns intuition into data and keeps the project grounded in player experience rather than internal opinion.

Balancing the Five Dimensions

For Silverfox Interactive, innovation isn’t about taking wild swings, it’s about choosing the right ones. Across all five dimensions, the studio applies creativity with intent: bold in gameplay design, pragmatic in technology, forward-looking in distribution, authentic in marketing, and disciplined in process. Each decision reflects a clear understanding of what to innovate, what to refine, and what to leave untouched.

They’re shaping a coherent whole. One where small, deliberate innovations add up to a distinct identity. SiFI’s story may be fictional, but its lesson is real: sustainable innovation comes from focus, not frenzy.

Inside Innovation

Innovation shouldn’t depend on luck. It’s a discipline—a way of thinking that combines focus, curiosity, and structure. The best teams understand where to innovate and where to stay conventional; they can take bolder risks with greater confidence.

The game industry celebrates innovation relentlessly, but rarely with discipline. We’ve confused novelty with value, boldness with strategy. The five dimensions don’t solve creativity, but they help channel it.

Editor’s note: This essay was originally published under the title “Innovation Inside.”

This essay is part of my ongoing series, Connecting the Pixels, where I explore how technology, creativity, and culture intersect in the future of interactive entertainment.

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• Most game companies have ambition but no clear strategy. They know what they want to make, but not where to excel.

• Strategy is deciding where to become great: what to focus on, who you serve, and how you’ll deliver something players value more than alternatives.

• Without strategy, success resets with each project instead of compounding. Brilliant teams drift instead of building mastery.

• Focus creates strength. Knowing when to say no sharpens creativity, builds expertise, and gives teams shared direction.

• Clear strategy aligns people, attracts investors, and channels creative energy. It’s not corporate—it’s one of the most creative acts a company can perform.

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“Explosions must look amazing!”

That’s what I excitedly exclaimed when I started Massive Entertainment in the mid 90s. I wanted to make “the best games in the world”—full stop. That gave us energy and purpose, but not direction. We had an abundance of creative intent but no strategy. It’s only later that I realised how big that difference is.

Over my thirty years in the industry—as a founder, executive, board member and investor—I’ve met hundreds of studios and publishers. Some brilliant, some chaotic, all ambitious. Too few had a clear strategy—or even understood what that word meant.

When I ask game company founders about their strategy, most describe their next game: the genre, mechanics, art style. Just like I did, they convey ambition—”we want to make great games”—but rarely a deliberate path to becoming the best at something specific.

I’ve seen the same pattern repeat again and again. Companies with strong creative ambition but weak strategic clarity. Studios and publishers who stumble onto success rather than design for it. Our industry often mistakes motion for direction.

Deciding Where to Become Great

Strategy is one of those words that sounds bigger than it needs to be. In business, it often gets buried under jargon: frameworks, matrices, and buzzwords that make it feel abstract or corporate.

But at its core, strategy is simple: it’s about deciding where to become great.

A strategy defines what you will focus on, who you’re serving, and how you’ll build something players will value more than other games—ideally doing so with less financial cost and minimal emotional pain. It’s the guiding direction behind every creative and commercial decision that follows.

At Massive, we had ambition but no defined strategy. Years later, at my next startup, we approached things differently. Our strategy was clear from day one: reinvent quiz and trivia games for a new audience. We saw a genre that millions of people loved but few developers treated with real design ambition. That clarity shaped everything, from the products we built to the talent we hired. It didn’t make the company bulletproof, but we knew what we were trying to master.

That’s the essence of strategy. It doesn’t guarantee success, but it gives a company purpose beyond its next project launch.

Why Game Companies Struggle With Strategy

Game founders almost always begin with artistic intent. They want to provide the kinds of games they love to play. That’s a powerful creative spark, but it rarely comes with a strategic frame. Artistic instinct answers what feels right, not what will make us experts in this space over time.

This is why so many companies “find” their strategy only after several projects, if they’re lucky enough to survive that long. They stumble upon what they’re good at through trial and error. It’s a creative lottery that rewards tenacity, but not necessarily discipline.

The cost of that lottery is enormous. I’ve seen brilliant teams run in every direction, restarting with each new project instead of learning from the last. Without a clear strategy, success doesn’t compound. It resets.

Strategy in Action

Strategies don’t need to come from boardrooms or expensive consultants. Sometimes they emerge from intuition and self-awareness—when a team recognizes what they’re truly passionate about, good at and has the courage to focus on it.

For example, a studio might decide to build first-person shooters for players over forty—people who love tactical depth and atmosphere but have no interest (or reflexes) for high-speed, competitive play. Or a publisher might commit entirely to pixel art and retro-inspired design, catering to the nostalgic subculture. They don’t chase every audience; they deepen their connection with one.

A great real-world example is the Swedish indie studio Landfall. They’ve had remarkable success with games like Stick Fight, Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, Content Warning, and PEAK. After growing from a few people to around twenty, the founders made a counterintuitive decision: they didn’t want to keep expanding. Instead, they scaled back to a handful of people and decided to make smaller games faster, each developed in three to six months.

That decision wasn’t framed as a strategy, but it absolutely was one. Landfall had learned what they were best at: creating inventive, funny, highly shareable multiplayer experiences that spread organically through player communities and social media. By focusing on that strength and structuring their studio around it, they turned their culture into strategy.

Landfall’s example shows that strategy doesn’t have to sound grand or complex. It’s simply a conscious choice about what to do—and what not to do. In their case, it was a strategy discovered through reflection rather than deliberate upfront design. Most teams never stumble into clarity by accident—so better to choose it on purpose.

The Fear of Focus

Many companies shy away from the topic of strategy because it feels abstract, restrictive, or simply irrelevant to creative work. They worry that choosing a direction will limit experimentation, that focus means giving something up. And they’re right: it does. Strategy means saying no to things. It means deciding what not to chase, what not to build, and what not to become. But that’s precisely where its power lies. Boundaries don’t stifle creativity, they sharpen it.

Strategy helps teams decide where to explore deeply, not whether to explore at all. When you choose where to specialize—whether it’s narrative-driven adventures, physics-based comedy, or online worlds—you give your team a shared language and clear direction. Over time, that focus compounds. It builds skill, knowledge, and intuition that make each new game release stronger than the last.

Defining Your Strategy

Deciding your strategy starts with three questions:

• What are we naturally good at—or could become great at?

• What do players value that aligns with those strengths?

• How can we build that capability faster or better than others?

The answers often emerge from honest reflection on your passion and past work. What have players responded to? What energizes your team? What do you keep doing better than expected? Sometimes, like Landfall, you discover your true strategy after several projects. Other times you choose deliberately from the start.

Defining a strategy isn’t complicated, but it does require intent. You need to decide what you want to become great at, and then communicate that direction so clearly that it guides large and small decisions.

In my experience, most teams actually don’t resist strategy—they just don’t understand it when it remains abstract. Once direction is clear, people usually find relief in having a shared sense of focus. It gives them permission to make choices with confidence.

For leaders, strategy becomes a multiplier. The key is to keep it visible—talk about it in all-hands meetings, product reviews, and one-on-ones. Connect it to concrete decisions.

When everyone understands where the company is heading, they can act with greater autonomy. Teams know what to prioritize, what to ignore, and when to discuss going “off strategy” as a deliberate exception.

Beyond internal alignment, strategy also transforms how others see your company. A clear strategy makes it easier to bring investors on board. When they understand your long-term direction—where you’re heading, how you plan to get there, and why you’ll win—they see more than a single project. They see a journey worth joining.

The goal isn’t to create a rigid rulebook—it’s to create alignment. A good strategy needs to be defined, lived, repeated, and occasionally questioned. That’s how it stays real.

The Creative Unlock

Strategy isn’t a requirement for success in games. Plenty of game companies have proven that passion, talent, and timing can carry you a long way. But a clear strategy increases the odds of turning that success into something lasting. It aligns teams, sharpens decisions, and keeps creativity moving in the same direction.

When you know what you want to become great at, every choice starts to make more sense. The hard decisions—what to build, who to hire, what to say no to—become easier, because they all point toward the same horizon.

The irony is that many people still see strategy as something corporate, when it’s really the opposite. Strategy is how creativity finds direction, how bold ideas become coherent, sustainable plans. It’s about defining not just what you want to make, but why and how you’ll make it better than anyone else.

In the end, what’s missing in most teams isn’t creativity or ambition—it’s strategy. And when it’s found, it becomes one of the most creative and liberating acts a team can perform.

This essay is part of my ongoing series, Connecting the Pixels, where I explore how technology, creativity, and culture intersect in the future of interactive entertainment.

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• Making great games means turning uncertainty into certainty through constant collaboration and iteration.

• The real magic happens when squares and circles—the engineers, artists, and designers—choose to understand, align and create together.

• Consensus culture works when it’s built on trust, curiosity, and shared ownership, not endless debate.

• The best teams discuss openly, decide clearly, and move fast together because everyone understands the why.

• Leadership in this model means pushing for progress, not control—listening deeply, and stepping in to decide when consensus stalls or drifts off course

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A friend recently put it well: “game development is the process of moving from uncertainty to certainty.“

At the start of a project, everything is fog. The mechanics, the tone, even the fun itself—all unknowns. Some teams try to manage this through control, planning every detail in advance. Others lean into chaos, trusting creativity will resolve the unknowns.

The best teams find a third path: they learn their way through collaboration, iteration, and relentless testing. Greatness in games isn’t born from a single genius or a perfect idea. It emerges from a culture where people listen deeply to one another, where engineers, artists, and designers work in genuine partnership.

I often think of them as squares and circles: the structured and the intuitive, the logical and the expressive. Squares bring rigor, systems thinking, and technical mastery. Circles bring imagination, emotional resonance, and creative vision. The magic happens where those shapes meet, clash, and eventually align.

Many teams shaped by Swedish and Nordic work culture have excelled at that balance. The outsized success of Nordic-created games—Battlefield, Minecraft, Clash of Clans, Valheim, The Division, Call of the Wild, Candy Crush, Hitman, and many more—is not a coincidence.

The consensus-driven mindset, often criticized for slowing things down, can become a powerful creative force. It encourages alignment, empathy, and trust. It gives teams the ability to turn uncertainty into clarity together.

The Consensus Advantage — Managing Uncertainty Through Collaboration

I believe that the consensus-driven mindset common across Sweden is often misunderstood. In many industries, it’s seen as a brake—a system that slows decisions and dilutes accountability. That’s sometimes true. But beneath that surface lies something powerful: a collective instinct to understand before deciding.

The word consensus itself derives from Latin—”to feel together” or “to think together”. It captures the same impulse: not harmony, but the willingness to face friction together.

In creative work, that instinct becomes an advantage. Game development depends on collaboration between disciplines that think and speak differently: engineers, designers, artists, writers, producers. The act of translating between those languages is where the real creation happens. Properly consensus-oriented teams don’t try to eliminate friction; they turn it into dialogue.

When such a team debates a feature, the goal isn’t to win the argument but to see the problem from every angle. Engineers explain what’s technically feasible. Designers describe how it should feel. Artists push for expression. The discussion can look slow from the outside, but it builds a shared mental model of what the team is creating—and why. In effect, responsibility becomes distributed.

To be clear, consensus-oriented teams don’t need to achieve universal agreement—but they need universal commitment after diverse input. Disagree and commit, if necessary. Consensus is not about democratic voting, it’s about opening up for everyone’s perspective.

In more hierarchical settings, uncertainty often gets hidden or deferred. People wait for the boss to decide, and problems accumulate in silence. In a consensus-driven culture (when it works), uncertainty is surfaced early and solved collectively. It may take longer to align, but it’s far more efficient in the long run.

This is why teams built on trust and collaboration often produce games that feel cohesive even at large scale. The cohesion isn’t accidental—it’s cultural. It’s the product of a thousand small conversations where squares and circles learn to create magic together.

Leadership in a Consensus Culture

Consensus doesn’t remove the need for good leadership. It changes what leadership means.

In a consensus-driven environment, the leader’s role isn’t to have all the answers but to maintain forward motion—to keep the team learning, testing, and improving even when the destination is unclear. A great leader sets direction, defines boundaries, and trusts the team to navigate within them.

This doesn’t mean leaders abandon their mandate. The leader still carries responsibility for direction, clarity, and quality. The difference is in timing and intent: top-down decisions are made when they’re needed, not reflexively out of habit or hierarchy. The job is to listen deeply, then decide clearly. The worst outcome isn’t disagreement—it’s drift: when a team gets stuck circling the same issue, chasing alignment instead of clarity.

In practice, leading in a consensus culture means moving between three modes: facilitator (asking and listening), synthesizer (identifying patterns and keeping momentum), and decider (stepping in when consensus hasn’t emerged, or time demands action).

Consensus cultures also depend on humility—especially from senior voices. The moment ego outweighs listening, alignment collapses and hierarchy rushes back in. Maintaining that balance is constant work, and even the best teams can lose it when age and experience starts to amplify individual confidence over collective judgment.

When it works, the effect of consensus is powerful. The team feels ownership rather than obedience. Decisions emerge faster because trust has already built alignment. And that trust, once established, becomes self-reinforcing—the team no longer waits for permission to act.

In directive cultures, momentum often depends on a single person’s vision and decision-making. In consensus-driven ones, momentum is distributed. One person can still own the high-level vision, but the momentum comes from shared responsibility and from the collective belief that progress is everyone’s job. Not just the leader’s.

Iteration — The Path to Certainty

If consensus is the cultural foundation of great game development, iteration is its working method. It’s how uncertainty turns into knowledge.

No one—not even the most experienced designer—can predict how a game will feel before it’s playable. Theories and design documents are useful, but they’re abstractions. The real learning begins when the team starts to play what they’ve built. Only then does the game start to speak back.

The best teams design their processes around that truth. They prototype early, playtest constantly, and treat every failed idea as data. It’s not about avoiding mistakes but about exposing them quickly enough to learn. The faster the feedback loop, the faster clarity emerges.

Psychological safety is essential. Teams must feel safe to show unfinished work, to have their ideas challenged, to admit when something isn’t working. Consensus-driven cultures tend to support that safety naturally: when everyone’s voice carries weight, criticism feels like contribution, not attack.

Iteration, then, is more than a production technique—it’s a mindset. It turns creativity into a continuous conversation between intention and outcome. Each cycle of building, testing, and rebuilding moves the team a little closer to certainty. Over time, that rhythm becomes second nature—a collective heartbeat that guides the work forward.

Case Study — World in Conflict

The first time I truly saw the power of iteration and consensus culture working in harmony was twenty years ago, when we developed World in Conflict at Massive Entertainment. Over a good two years of development, the team grew from about 30 to more than 100 people—a challenge in itself.

From the very beginning of that project, we established a simple rule: the game should always be playable. Within a few months we had a rough version running, and from that point on we held weekly playtests, almost always with external players. Those sessions forced us to face the truth of our work, week after week. If something felt off, it couldn’t hide behind a roadmap or a future milestone. The problems were right there on the screen, visible to everyone.

The playtests didn’t become blame sessions. They became design conversations. Engineers, designers, and artists all contributed. That collective ownership created both speed and quality. Over time, we developed not only a stronger game but a stronger team—one that had learned how to learn together.

The result was a game that felt greater than the sum of its parts. As one reviewer noted: “It’s not very often that a real-time strategy title comes along and changes the way you think about the genre. World in Conflict is one of those, not because all of the ideas are totally new, but because they’re all put together in such a successful way.”

That phrase—”put together in such a successful way”—captures something essential about consensus-driven development. The innovation wasn’t in any single system, but in how squares and circles learned to synthesize their perspectives into a coherent whole.

Looking back, World in Conflict remains one of the clearest examples I’ve seen of what happens when squares and circles truly meet. The structure of engineering, the imagination of design, the discipline of iteration, and the trust of consensus all converging into something magical.

Closing Reflection

What I took from World in Conflict has stayed with me ever since: great games are made by cultures designed for learning.

Tools, budgets, and ideas all matter, but they’re secondary to a team’s ability to adapt. The studios that consistently deliver remarkable games aren’t necessarily those with the boldest visions; they’re the ones that learn fastest. They’ve built systems and cultures where uncertainty is surfaced early, discussed openly, and resolved through iteration rather than decree.

Consensus, in that context, isn’t indecision. It’s distributed intelligence. Learning happens everywhere, all the time—not just in the heads of a few senior people. When everyone has a voice, feedback loops multiply.

When structure and creativity meet in that spirit, something magical happens. Squares build the frame; circles fill it with meaning. One without the other is incomplete. Together, through trust, iteration, and shared ownership, they form the space where uncertainty turns into clarity and where great games emerge.

Because in the end, great games aren’t commanded into existence. They’re discovered—through the constant dialogue between squares and circles.

This essay is part of my ongoing series, Connecting the Pixels, where I explore how technology, creativity, and culture intersect in the future of interactive entertainment.

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The games industry is reshaping itself from what I call the High Pyramid: steep, exclusive, and driven by technical mastery—into the Wide Pyramid: open, creative, and accessible.

• The High Pyramid defined the early decades of gaming. Complex tools and specialized knowledge meant that only a few could make games, and the gap between amateur and professional output was enormous.

• The Wide Pyramid is emerging as tools become easier and more powerful. Its base is vastly larger, containing hundreds of millions of potential creators, and its height is smaller—meaning the quality gap between hobbyists and professionals is narrowing.

• Game Bands—small, highly creative teams of up to 10 people—will become the cultural equivalent of rock bands in music. They’ll define their own styles, connect directly with players, and work efficiently with new AI-powered platforms.

• The relationship between creators and players will shift from brand to band. Players will follow their favorite creators like fans follow artists, not just for what they make, but for who they are.

• The big question for today’s professionals: Are we clinging to the old pyramid, or embracing the new one?

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“The hardest part of making games used to be getting them to work. Now it’s getting anyone to notice.”

That line has stuck with me. Granted, it’s never been easy to get people to notice your games, but in recent years that challenge has increased dramatically. The industry is shifting from old structures—what I call the High Pyramid of exclusivity—toward something wider and far more open.

The High Pyramid was narrow at the base, steep on the sides, and with only a small group at the pointy top. Few had access to the tools, teams, or funding to make games. Turning an idea into a product was expensive and slow.

At the top of the High Pyramid were the big studios and the most experienced teams, creating the highest-quality and most commercially successful games. At the bottom were the modders, hobbyists, and small indies experimenting with whatever tools they could find.

It wasn’t by choice—it reflected an era when complexity and cost created steep barriers.

But that’s now changing—fast.

We’re now entering the era of the Wide Pyramid. Its base is far broader, containing vastly more creators. Where the High Pyramid globally represented maybe hundreds of thousands of professionals and a few million hobbyists, the Wide Pyramid will eventually include hundreds of millions of people creating interactive experiences in one form or another.

At the same time, its height—the gap between the lowest- and highest-quality output—is shrinking. Quality at the base is steadily moving closer to quality at the top. Small teams, and even individuals, can now produce games that rival professional studios in craft and ambition.

If you make, fund, or even follow games, this shift will redefine your world. AI and new tools aren’t replacing creativity—they’re amplifying it. They compress production time, remove technical barriers, and free creators to focus on what truly matters: vision, emotion, and play.

In short, we’re moving from an industry defined by restricted access and high barriers to one defined by creative abundance and accessibility. And that changes everything—from how we build games to how we discover them, fund them, and play them.

The Rise of the Game Bands

As the Wide Pyramid takes shape, we’re seeing a new kind of creative unit emerge: what I like to call game bands.

Like rock bands in music, these are small, focused groups of creators who come together to express themselves through interactive entertainment. They rely on shared vision, close collaboration, and efficient use of new technology.

A typical game band might be five to ten people, each with their own specialty: gameplay direction, art, animation, storytelling, sound, or style. Together they can produce something that feels personal and distinct, yet polished enough to reach an audience.

We’re already seeing glimpses of this future. Small teams like those behind Valheim, Hades, Content Warning, Balatro, and PEAK have built global hits with minimal resources and short timelines—showing what’s possible when creativity meets accessible technology.

Players don’t just play their games; they follow their journeys, their development blogs, their behind-the-scenes content. The relationship feels personal, more like following a band than buying from a corporation.

And these projects are reaching hundreds of thousands of dedicated players, sometimes millions. These games don’t have giant budgets or marketing machines behind them, but they connect deeply through creativity, storytelling, and distinctive ideas.

Over the next decade, we’ll see many thousands of these game bands forming. Some long-term, others for a single project, and each exploring their own creative direction, much like musicians forming a new sound.

What will define their success isn’t technology, but creativity, personality, and connection. As tools become easier to master, originality becomes the true differentiator. Players will start to follow these creators not just for their games, but for their voices, styles, and ideas.

From Brand to Band

As more people start creating games, the relationship between players and creators will change too.

In the High Pyramid era, players mostly connected with studios or franchises, names like Blizzard, Rockstar, Supercell, or Nintendo. The people behind the games were largely invisible. But in the Wide Pyramid, that connection will increasingly shift from brand to band.

Players will follow their favorite creators as much as their favorite games, caring about who makes them—their values, process, and stories. It won’t just be about what they play, but who made it. Game bands will need to be as good at community building, storytelling and marketing as they are at game creation.

At the same time, the line between player and creator will blur. Many players will experiment with making their own games, just as millions of people have tried playing an instrument or writing a song. Some will do it for fun; others will discover a new creative outlet they never expected.

Far from everyone will become a professional developer, and most game bands will inevitably fail commercially. Demand will not grow just because there is endless more content to experience. Most players will still prefer polished experiences from the creators they admire. But accessible tools will invite far more people to try—to express themselves through interactive experiences, even on a small scale.

This shift is cultural, not just technical. It changes how people see games—from products they consume to expressions they can participate in. Over time, that will redefine what we mean when we talk about “the games industry.”

Looking Ahead

Step back and compare the two pyramids, and it’s clear we’re in one of the biggest transitions the games industry has ever seen.

The High Pyramid was built around restricted access—to tools, funding, and knowledge. It was inevitable for its time and produced incredible work, but it was also limited to a relatively small group of people who had the skills and resources to enter and climb it.

The Wide Pyramid is built around creativity and accessibility. Its base is expanding rapidly, and while many can already turn ideas into playable experiences, many more will be able to soon. That’s where we’re heading—toward a world where making interactive entertainment becomes a normal form of creative expression.

In this new world, some creators will thrive, others will struggle to stay relevant. The Wide Pyramid will reshape every part of our ecosystem—development, funding, marketing, and talent.

And then there’s the sheer abundance of it all. The industry has always produced more games than players can possibly experience—but we’ve seen nothing yet. The challenge has never been scarcity of content, but scarcity of attention. Playtime itself is finite—no matter how much we create, the number of hours each player has available doesn’t grow. Discovery, curation, and trust will become even more critical.

In the end, if history shows anything, it’s that change brings opportunity. We’re entering a period that will unleash creativity on a scale we’ve never seen. For those of us working in games today, the question isn’t whether the Wide Pyramid will happen—it’s how we’ll respond. Will we cling to old structures, or start experimenting with different, more expressive ways to create?

In the years ahead, the most exciting stories in games will be about people: small teams, empowered by new tools, redefining the interactive experiences that resonate with the audiences.

The pyramid is changing shape—and it’s inviting all of us to climb, create, and play in entirely new ways.

This essay is part of my ongoing series, Connecting the Pixels, where I explore how technology, creativity, and culture intersect in the future of interactive entertainment.

I explore how technology, creativity, and culture intersect in the evolving world of interactive entertainment. And how the ways we create, play, and connect are being redefined.

I write for anyone curious about where games are heading next: developers, designers, storytellers, technologists, or simply people who love the medium.

The goal is to make sense of the changes shaping the industry—not through hype or fear, but through curiosity, clarity, and a relentless belief in creativity.

Welcome to Connecting the Pixels! Let’s explore the future of play together.