Working as a videogame designer is highly varied, depending on the game project and its particular phase: from almost boundless brainstorming one usually winds up working to balance an elaborate structure. On the one hand, building worlds is vivid story-telling, and on the other it is about assembling levels and other content piece by piece. In one single project I have been in charge of planning, writing, testing, customer service and marketing. All these roles are equally important.

In small videogame teams, which comprise the majority of game developers in Finland, responsibility for the project’s success is shared by all the team members. This responsibility is tangible in one’s daily work. There are two clear indicators of success for a commercial game. The most obvious is financial success, the achievement of which, in at least in some projects, is a precondition for the continuation of the game company. The other is the quality of the game: how functional, enjoyable and entertaining it is.

From the beginning of the 1980s, perhaps the most significant measure of the quality of a game has been the rating it receives from game critics. As someone who has worked as a videogame journalist, I know just how subjective the number given at the end of a game review is. Games are judged in relation to other releases in the same year and to a list of different check-box features which act more as yardsticks for the reviewer than real predictors of quality. A polished sequel in a cinematic game series will triumph in such a comparison over almost any competitor. In this, my own debut game also fared poorly.

The rise in popularity of games-as-a-service in the 2010s allows players’ behaviour to be followed, and on that basis the game’s quality can be assessed more objectively. Information on how many players return to the game is an incontrovertible measure of the game’s attraction. This development can be considered a paradigm shift: the success of a game does not require that you live up to the expectations of game critics and the market. When designing a game it is possible to remove everything superfluous and concentrate on the essential from the perspective of your own game.

The videogame industry has been in a constant state of change for as long as I have worked in the sector. The reason could well be the nature of game development, where game designers build new game worlds on the basis of continuously developing technology. Games that compete in terms of novelty and inventiveness constantly drive the whole industry to the cusp of change, and crossing that point leads to upheavals, redundancies, new mega-successes and an ever more exciting world of games.