Greg Rinaldi

Delayed PC releases bring about 13% of players, while day-one launches reach around 44% on PC. According to Omdia, nearly 60% of surveyed projects are already cross-platform, and 18% are triple-platform titles: PC, console, and mobile. The industry signal is clear. The future strategy is less about porting games, and more about cross-platform launches.

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Thank you to Steve Ruddock for having me on the Straight to the Point podcast. Steve's daily newsletter is a must-read and his podcast goes deeper on issues that matter. This one was worth the time. Responsible gaming is a business advantage and operators who treat it that way are building something more durable. At Underdog, that belief shapes how we approach player protection and what we back through GuardDog, our responsible gaming innovation fund. A big part of our conversation focused on national self-exclusion. The current system is fragmented by state. That's a design flaw. Underdog is working with idPair and other operators to build a shared, cross-operator self-exclusion network that follows the player everywhere. This collaboration doesn't come naturally in a competitive industry. It requires operators to agree that some things matter more than short-term gains and I'm proud other RG leaders like Phil Sherwood are at the table too. The episode covers a lot of ground. Link in comments.

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A new breed of micro-indie publisher focused on sub $200K budget games is emerging. Low dev cost regions, shipping products fast, and building a repeatable machine for discovery in the attention war. When I asked Kirill Akimkin how PC games get discovered, he said, "It's half short-form content and the other half is from friends. But from friends means someone shared the video with them. So short form is the cheat code." Their strategy is working so far. Totally Secure Airport sits at 260K wishlists and counting, and got 75K wishlists in one day due to a single viral video. Final Sentence is sitting at 290K, and Deadhikers is at 130K as of this past weekend. Polden Publishing's portfolio to date includes: Fish Hunters, Football Story, Bus Flipper Simulator, Train Valley Origins, and the hotly anticipated titles of Meowgik and the titles mentioned above. In 2025, they shipped 7 games, and in 2026, they have aspirations to ship 20. 🔊We Discuss: - Where do Polden's developers come from, and are there challenges in speed and quality when trying to push so many games out the gate? - What does the relationship between the publisher and developer look like, and from the pipeline perspective, what is Polden looking for when it comes to game pitches? - The uncanny emphasis on user testing. If the game doesn't hit the scores across median play time on Steam or surveys, it gets cut. - Recipes for discovery, both outside of Steam and playing to their strengths on the Steam algorithm. - Why they'd made choices on delaying games and lessons learned on games that did not meet their expectations. ‼️And then we chat about all the existential stuff. - What happens if Steam changes the algorithm? - Do Steam Next Fests even matter? - In low-budget titles like this, do players still care about AI usage? - What is changing about the tastes of the modern gamer? - Where do we think discovery truly occurs right now? 🖥️ If you are shipping a game on Steam, this is a definite must-listen. Listen to Naavik's channels on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube below in the comments. #gaming #indie #discovery

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For those of you who might be interested, I am giving 3/4 of a talk at GDC this year along with Brad Hendricks, the CEO of Blind Squirrel. Our talk is about "building a global development team" and my part of the exercise details some of the production practices we use to manage our different teams in different locales around the world in a consistent manner. In particular, I'll be deep diving into how we capture and utilize KPI's from our teams to try and avoid issues in advance of them occurring. The date and time of this extravaganza is: Thursday, March 12 | 11:50am - 12:50pm. Location: Room 3002, West Hall. I hope to see you there!

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BlueberryAI is doubling down on their lies and theft. They've re-hosted their stolen GDC events list, claiming, "The list is compiled from multiple sources, such as Eventbrite, Luma, and other public listings...". Which is exactly how I created the original GDCparties.com list in the first place! BlueberryAI's list still matches the GDCparties.com list 1-to-1. This time, they've reformatted it so it no longer looks just like my site, and they've severed the datasource, so I can no longer update their site from my personal Google Sheet...but they've left all of the calendar links pointing to my fellowshipofgamedevparties@gmail.com calendar (I added all 220 of these manually by the way). They continue to claim that the 'Add To Calendar' feature is theirs, just as they're lying about the list being theirs. BlueberryAI is also claiming that I was previously able to modify their site contents using the "Add an event" button. BlueberryAI doesn't seem to understand that this button links directly to my own Google Form (where I then manually edit and add to my main spreadsheet). If you make a copy of my spreadsheet, and expand the hidden rows, you can see where I added the content from my previous post. If BlueberryAI hadn't stolen my code, editing my own personal spreadsheet would have had no effect, and this content would not have appeared on their site. Doubling-down on this theft strongly implies that BlueberryAI leadership intentionally made this decision, not some rogue engineer. Many more details in this GamesBeat article: https://lnkd.in/gqJvQYhK

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I'm late to the party but if you missed this podcast with Adam Boyes you should take some time today and listen/watch. The video game industry is at an inflexion point and things need to be done!! Gaming Decoded, Vivrato's new podcast hosted by Andrea Rene, just dropped its first episode featuring Adam Boyes. ThinkMasterclass meets Diary of a CEO, but built for the games business. Real conversations with the operators and leaders shaping the industry. Come take a listen!   vivrato.com/podcast

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Interesting thoughts but I do have to ask: Why it F2P not sustainable? F2P has existed for decades now. There are only so many business models to consider. And in terms of strategy, you can really only choose value or brand. So what’s interesting about that past is that the “value” strategy is not f2p, it’s a premium priced game. Gamers are smart and when considering value, they’re more concerned about the long-term cost over the upfront costs. These are also some of our industry’s “core” players over two decades. I think Owen Mahoney did a great piece splitting our industry into four quadrants. Generically these audiences care about different things. F2P customers are much more socially-driven. They often spend as part of their lifestyle and to show off to friends. Premium players are often about skill and escapism. If anything I think we’ve seen more sustainability from f2p games in the last 5-10 years than premium games.

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As I read more and more reports about the recent Xbox layoffs one thing becomes clearer about MSFT’s intent in this round: This wave was not driven by a desire to replace workers with AI as some have speculated. Instead I believe the intent was to “improve” a Span of Control KPI. What I notice is that a great number of the layoffs occurred among quite senior employees level 64-66 at the Director and Senior Director level. That is middle management. If this had been an AI replacement exercise MSFT would have kept more experienced people and fired mostly junior people as AI replacement tends to produce better results with more experienced humans in the loop. The driving out of experienced middle management, and I’m talking about some absolute legends in the industry, points to a different organizational goal: Span of Control. MSFT and many other tech firms have in recent years looked at the ratio of management to direct reports and sought to increase the number of reports each manager has as some measure of organizational efficiency. Misguided or not this is a trend that has been widely reported on before. It also doesn’t hurt that middle management is paid better and makes a juicer target for cost cutting when a business unit’s targets are not met. If you don’t make the margin goals Corporate needs you to make, you have to offer a tribute or face their wrath. And that is what I believe this is all about. Just my opinion. #xbox #gameindustry #gamedev

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A: 🌟 Exciting Announcement! 🌟 We are thrilled to share that 345 Games USA, LLC has officially signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Afri-Tek Innovations! This collaboration empowers Afri-Tek to develop and commercialize digital versions of the physical games created by 345 Games USA, further bridging the gap between physical and digital gaming experiences. Both companies are proud to be based in Del Mar, CA, and are led by our visionary founder, Dahmane Dahmani, a retired technical executive from Intel. 🌍 Under this partnership, the exclusive management of digital games and apps will be in the capable hands of Afri-Tek Innovations. We are excited to announce that the first set of games will be launched by October 31 on the Apple Store, with availability on Google Play by November 30, 2025! Dahmane Dahmani shared his enthusiasm: "This is an exciting time for both companies as we deliver both physical and digital games to our audience." 🎮 **About 345 Games USA:** We specialize in developing and commercializing games inspired by ancient traditions, infused with a modern twist in both look and gameplay. 🌍 **About Afri-Tek Innovations:** This innovative company draws from Africa’s rich and diverse heritage to create captivating digital apps and games. For more information, feel free to reach out to Dahmane Dahmani at: 📧 Info@345-games.com 📧 Dahmane@Afri-tek.com Stay tuned for more updates as we embark on this exciting journey together! 🚀 #Gaming #Innovation #DigitalTransformation #Partnership #AfriTek #345GamesUSA

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Everyone's arguing about whether DLSS 5 will "YASAFFAY" game characters and ruin artistic vision. Late take, but: this is the wrong conversation. Remember when ray tracing first showed up? Games that shipped without it got RTX patches later. People panicked about "unintended lighting" breaking the developer's vision. Turned out fine. Devs who cared about lighting already knew what pipeline they were targeting. Everyone else got a nice optional upgrade. DLSS 5 is the same pattern. It's an optional feature in a mature upscaler stack. Game developers aren't accidentally going to lose control of their art direction because Nvidia ships a better reconstruction model. They know what tech their game supports. They build around it. But here's what's actually wild about DLSS 5 that nobody seems to be talking about. The img2img consistency. Frame to frame coherence at that level of reconstruction is genuinely hard. Anyone who's tried to get stable diffusion to produce two consistent frames in a row knows the pain. Nvidia apparently just... solved a huge chunk of that? At real time performance? That's the story. Not "will my characters look weird." The fact that we now have inference based image reconstruction that holds together across motion, camera cuts, and varying scene complexity. At playable framerates. The character smoothing discourse feels like complaining about JPEG artifacts on the Hubble telescope.

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IP as an infrastructure: what it means for how games get made. The games industry just closed a year that should feel like a victory lap. Revenue up. Engagement up. Record spending. And yet.... 45,000 people lost their jobs in three years. The middle market is hollowing out. Revenue is concentrating around franchises that figured out something the rest of the industry is catching up to: IP isn’t a product. It’s a platform. IP became multi-vector delivery: The biggest moves of the last 18 months aren’t game deals — they’re IP infrastructure deals. Netflix spent $82.7 billion on Warner Bros. Entertainment . not for game studios, but for IP it can exploit across streaming, interactive, and merchandise simultaneously. Sony proved the model with The Last of Us: a game franchise that became a cultural event through television, feeding back into game sales. Games Workshop turned #Warhammer into a licensing empire across tabletop, video games, TV, and film. In every case, the game is one vector of a multi-surface strategy. This reshapes what gets greenlit and what “success” means. Sport is the ultimate multi-vector IP. In December 2025, sports titles held half the top 10 console revenue positions. But the real story is the capital structure behind them. The Saudi PIF consortium didn’t just take Electronic Arts (EA) private for $55 billion. They’re simultaneously investing in football clubs, #F1, #boxing, #golf, and #esports. They’re treating sport itself as an IP — the game is one monetization surface alongside broadcast rights, live events, and merchandise. Netflix is running the same playbook on cultural IP. DC, #HarryPotter, #GameofThrones — each franchise now feeds streaming, interactive, and live experiences under one roof. Games become a permanent surface, not a licensing afterthought. The production volume this generates is enormous. And structurally recurring. Production evolved — harshly Game production moved from centralized-in-studio to managed-with-multiple-partners. Not because studios wanted it — because 45,000 jobs didn’t come back, games got bigger, and content cadence accelerated. Every major production now coordinates across internal teams, co-dev partners, and specialist studios. That’s growing external production at 7.5–10% annually. But it’s not overflow anymore. It’s structural. #AI landed — but not where you think. 36% of professionals use generative AI. Most common application? Research and brainstorming — not production pipelines, not shipped assets. And 52% of creatives view the technology negatively. Not fear of change — they’ve seen what happens when tools outpace governance. So: IP is becoming infrastructure. Production is becoming distributed. The industry is spending more while demanding more from every partner in the chain. What does a production partner built for this world look like? ->That’s my next post... Heading to GDC next week. If any of this resonates, let’s talk. #GDC2026 #GameDev #CoDecv #IP

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RPG, ARPG, Lite-ARPG. When does the label stop helping? Three letters. Potentially the most abused three letters in game marketing. Walk any Steam storefront and you'll notice that half the catalogue claims RPG somewhere in its description. The term has been stretched so far that it now covers everything from Baldur's Gate 3 (174 hours of branching D&D narrative) to a mobile tap-fest with a level-up animation. Same label. Completely different contract. 𝗦𝗼, 𝗹𝗲𝘁'𝘀 𝗯𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗸 𝗶𝘁 𝗱𝗼𝘄𝗻. 𝗥𝗣𝗚: 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘪𝘯 𝘢 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘳, 𝘸𝘢𝘵𝘤𝘩 𝘥𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥. Menus, dialogue trees, stat sheets. 𝗔𝗥𝗣𝗚: 𝘩𝘪𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦, 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘨𝘦𝘢𝘳, 𝘩𝘪𝘵 𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴. Diablo defined this in 1997 and it has only been iterated since then. 𝗟𝗶𝘁𝗲-𝗔𝗥𝗣𝗚: the loot loop, streamlined. Hades makes it work brilliantly. Most mobile titles just borrow the credibility. 𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺. 74% of players rely on genre labels when choosing a game. Which means when you stamp "RPG" on something, you're activating years of player imprinting, the memories of their first RPG, their expectations of depth, progression, meaningful choice. If your game doesn't deliver on even one of those axes, you haven't just disappointed them, you have broken a contract. Last week I argued that audience clarity is a design decision. Genre labels are where that decision goes public. Cozy, strategy, bad game, they are all contracts with your audience. RPG is no different, except that the expectations are deeper, and harder to manage because the label covers so much ground. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗵𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗾𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗱𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘀: What is the actual mechanic you're asking the player to repeat? Is it 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘪𝘤𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘦 𝘢 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘳? Then RPG earns its place. Is it 𝘬𝘪𝘭𝘭, 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘵, 𝘶𝘱𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘦, 𝘳𝘦𝘱𝘦𝘢𝘵? ARPG it is then. Is it 𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘤𝘬 𝘳𝘶𝘯, 𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘨𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯, 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘵? Say roguelite. Pretty please, just don't say RPG and hope nobody notices. The Souls-like label is instructive here. FromSoftware never claimed it. The community built it and this is precisely because it describes something specific enough to set accurate expectations. "RPG" has lost that specificity, it has become what "cozy" was before anyone interrogated it: a comfort word, applied broadly hence meaning almost nothing anymore. Bummer! The studios getting this right lead with the 𝘧𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘴𝘺, not the genre. They sell the feeling first, then let the label confirm it, it doesn't have to carry the whole weight. #GameDesign #GameDev #GamingIndustry #ProductStrategy #IndieGames

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I could not agree more regarding AI in gaming specifically (and for life, more generally)!! Excel’s impact on Accounting, sure, but how about… Internet impact on Commerce Smart Phones impact on Gaming Social Networks impact on Media (or Elections 😉) Humans rarely utilize innovation in the most effective way at first, but we do get there eventually.

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Some of the numbers in this year's GDC State of the Industry report really hit me hard. 28% of all respondents have been laid off in the last two years. 33% in the US. Two thirds of them came from AAA studios. And half of those happened in just the last 12 months. When I see numbers like that, I don't just see numbers. I see mortgages. I see families. I see people who moved across the country for a dream job and now have to move back. A few things I think we need to talk about after sitting with this for a few hours: AAA is still amazing and it will always be amazing. But I don't think it should be the only goal anymore. Funny enough, quite a few of the younger animators I'm meeting through REKiNDLED Studios , our codev studio, actually don't want to work at AAA. They want flexibility. Multiple projects. A safety net if one project blows up. The AI fear is much much bigger than the reality. 81% of devs use AI for research and brainstorming. Only 19% for asset generation. Students are the ones I worry about most. 74% feel their future in this industry is at risk. Senior level animators are taking mid level jobs just to pay the rent, which means juniors are competing against people with 10x their experience for the same seats. The path is harder but It is not closed. The opportunities are still out there for anybody willing to specialise, ship something, and put their work in front of the world. I broke the whole report down on YouTube with my honest take after 20 plus years in this industry. Link in the comments. If you got laid off recently or can relate with this drop a line below.

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Last week, I joined a panel at Gamesforum SF, where attendees and speakers showcased the innovation, passion, and energy that continue to define our industry. Here are three of my key takeaways — I’d love to hear yours: 1️⃣ Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) is redefining trust. In my panel, “Revenue, Retention & Trust with Out-of-Game Experiences: Unlocking D2C,” I shared how SciPlay’s D2C strategy is reshaping how we connect with players—focusing on value, trust, and lasting engagement beyond gameplay. 2️⃣ AI is reshaping every part of gaming. AI is expanding the boundaries of creativity and innovation. From player acquisition to design and production, it’s transforming how we imagine, build, and deliver experiences. We’re only beginning to uncover its potential—and it’s an incredible time to explore what’s next. 3️⃣ The industry never stands still. Change is the only constant in gaming. Insightful sessions from leaders like Corey Rosemond and Dobrinka Kostadinova highlighted how rapidly mobile and player behaviors are evolving—and why curiosity, adaptability, and forward thinking remain our greatest strengths.

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In what should come as a surprise to no one, 90% of videogame developers report making use of AI in their workflows. It’s being used across-the-board, in every department.

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