'I design video games - here's what I think about angry fans'

If you've ever spent your morning commute daydreaming about starting afresh with your career, this feature is for you. Each Monday, we speak to someone from a different profession to discover what it's really like. Today we speak to Alistair McFarlane, chief operating officer of game design company Facepunch Studios and the executive producer of survival game Rust...

We let staff work whatever hours and days suit them... as long as the work gets done. If you want to mow your grass at 2pm, go for it. Facepunch definitely isn't typical for the industry. For the most part, it's a normal job, around 35 hours a week.

I get relatives thinking I just play games all day a lot... but I don't. A lot of my job is strategy, people management, planning, product decisions and making sure teams have what they need to actually build great things. There are meetings, roadmaps, hiring, problem-solving and a lot of unglamorous stuff behind the scenes. Playing the game is usually a small part of it.

The long-running argument that video games encourage violence is... one I have never bought into. Decades of peer-reviewed research have failed to find any causal link between video games and real-world violence. It's an easy headline, but it doesn't hold up. In reality, games are a massive outlet for social connection and stress relief. We see them used in therapy, education and even pain management. And it's honestly a shame the press so often blame such a creative industry when there's no correlation. Like any form of media, context matters, but blaming games for violence oversimplifies a much bigger, more complex set of issues.

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The biggest advice I can give is... make stuff. Don't wait for the perfect opportunity, just start building things, mods, prototypes, little games, tools, whatever. You learn far more by doing than by watching. Now with AI, learning and experimenting is easier than ever.

I genuinely believe AI is for the better, not the worse... It's powerful, it's efficient and at the end of the day, it's just another tool, one that helps people move faster and focus on the creative stuff. Sure, it's disruptive, no question about that. Every major shift in tech is. But used properly, AI doesn't replace creativity, it amplifies it. It removes busywork, speeds up iteration and gives teams more space to experiment.

The art of making a good game is... it has to be something you genuinely want to make, not just something you think will perform well on a spreadsheet. Don't play it safe. The best games come from teams who care deeply and aren't afraid to take risks. When that passion comes through, players feel it.

Games can be expensive, especially at the high end... but they also don't have to be. You can make a game solo, for free, with nothing more than time and curiosity. A lot of breakout indie hits came from passionate people building things in their spare time. That's how I first got started. If you care enough and put the hours in, the barriers to entry have never been lower.

A great place to start is modding existing games... It teaches you how systems fit together without needing to build everything from scratch...

A game is millions of lines of code all holding hands. If one person lets go, the whole thing can collapse... It's honestly a small miracle that any game runs at all, let alone evolves and ships new content as regularly as we do.

Mario is a masterclass in design... Simple controls, instant readability, pure fun. You can hand it to almost anyone and they'll get it in seconds. That kind of accessibility mixed with depth is rare, and honestly timeless.

But then there's World of Warcraft... I've yet to find another game that quite matched that first WoW feeling. Logging in, seeing Ironforge packed, discovering zones for the first time, it was magic. The scale of WoW in 2004 was just unreal. Epic, huge and for its time completely unheard of. It mashed together so many parts of games I already loved into one living world, exploration, progression, social play, raids, all of it.

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We're not really competing with Sony or Activision in the traditional sense... we're playing a different game. Indie studios tend to be more ambitious in risk-taking, we can move faster, try weird ideas and ship things that wouldn't survive an AAA [a term used to classify high-budget, high-profile games] greenlight process.

It's an incredibly competitive industry... A lot of studios are one bad release away from shutting their doors, and it's expensive to make games. You see a lot of burn and churn as a result.

We genuinely read community comments, from everywhere... We never ignore them. Sometimes they hurt, sometimes they inspire us, but they always matter. There's a huge amount of engineering, iteration and care happening behind the scenes, even when it doesn't look like it from the outside.

One of the biggest things I've learned is... that the people who can be the loudest or harshest are often your most passionate and dedicated community members, they just don't always channel it in the right way. Over the years, you start to realise that most anger comes from investment.

The biggest lesson for me was... take the time to step back and look at the bigger picture. Are we building the right thing, for the right audience, at the right scale, with the time and money we actually have? If the answer isn't a confident yes, you need to change course early because the later you leave it, the more painful it gets.

If I could go back, I... wouldn't change anything. Every day is a learning experience, and without the mistakes along the way, I wouldn't be where I am now. Good decisions, bad decisions, they all teach you something. It's all part of the journey. Just make sure you put people first along the way because that matters more than anything else.

(c) Sky News 2026: 'I design video games - here's what I think about angry fans'