Game Studio Unlocked
Sebastian CardosoMost indie studios don't fail because they lack talent or passion. They fail because running a studio is a completely different skill from game dev. Twenty years of hard lessons on production, leadership and studio-building to help indie studios succeed.
| Platform |  | Pricing | Only free issues | Publishes | Daily |
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| Issues | 46 | Founded | 4 months ago | Last Issue | 10 days ago |
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gamestudiounlocked.substack.comLatest Issues
Poor performance is not a game engine problem
There’s been a lot of vitriol from gamers over the past few years about games made in Unreal suffering from performance issues. This misdiagnosis irks me to no end, so I want to share a few thoughts.
Let me first start with a few examples:...
Conflict resolution for indie game studios
Game development is, structurally, a conflict-generating environment. That’s not a criticism. It’s just the nature of the beast.
You’re putting people from radically different disciplines in a room together, like engineers and artists and...
Cultivating a culture of experimentation
The playbook for “innovation culture” typically looks like this: you set aside 20% “creative” or “pet project” time, run quarterly hackathons, put up a poster about psychological safety and maybe schedule a TED talk about “failing often and...
AI in game development today
Gemma 4 is running locally in the background as I write this. Claude Code has been nearly indispensable on my small Godot pet project. I make assets on Pixellab. I mocked up some images on Gemini this morning. AI is very present in my day-t...
A Toyota lesson game studios can learn from
By 1982, General Motors had run out of patience with its Fremont, California assembly plant and shut it down.
The decision was probably not difficult to make. For twenty years, the plant had been a slow-motion disaster. It had the worst qu...
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Authors
The writers behind this newsletter.
20 years shipping games, from League of Legends to 5-person indie startups. Led teams at Riot, Crytek and EA. I write about how indie studios can succeed, as well the macro picture of the games industry.
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