A great experience at Madeira Games Summit! 2026

I have had the pleasure of attending DevGAMM's Madeira Games Summit, an event where C-level people (meaning CEOs, CTOs, CFOs etc) from publishers, investors, game studios and much more, all get together and talk about the gaming industry.

In this moment of huge [industry] uncertainty and negativity, from layoffs and big AI headlines to investors or publishers not taking bets anymore - it is great to see that the actual conversations are really reeeally different (in a good way).

If you base your opinions from the internet discourse, you would think that the CEOs simply don't care about games and they only cared about the money. This is why no one is funding original games anymore (too much risk, unproven market), they are all firing people for AI (reducing costs while keeping the """"same"""" output, lol), or firing people in general and making bad decisions for players and developers every day. At the end of the day, everyone is trying to pay rent - but holy sh* the apathy and indifference.

From the conversations in Madeira tough, it could have not been more distant than this.

I've met leaders who deeply care about games all around, know that AI is only a tool (and most of the time it's also bullshit), and that people - the players and game developers - are always in the center and must be cultivated and grow with them.

I remember joining the industry and being welcomed with passion and friendliness all around. Then as I grew up, I started noticing that some friendliness was only due to the language barrier, other was cultural, and other was only for wanting to look like a great company to work with - but among all the bad deals, adults showing up hangover from the night before and many other bad stories all over the place, my excitement went away. I was still passionate to make games and met wonderful developers, but I didn't feel that the industry was in good hands.

It was great to re-discover that initial energy back, and directly from the people who can move the needle. This event was a great concentration of that.

Then the question becomes: if the majority of CEOs are not evil (apparently?): how the hell did we end up here, and how can we fix it? That would be for other posts though, as there's too much to say (and the reasons are mixed, of course).

Thanks for reading through here, and to the DevGAMM organisers for creating such a good event.

Ciao!