Rebuilding a studio around live service

A premium studio ships a title, sells it, moves on, and lets the back catalogue quietly die. That model was already failing when I took over the product function, and the catalogue was the asset nobody was managing.

What changed

I rebuilt the operating model around live service: the roles, the instrumentation, the review cadence. Releases moved from yearly to a biweekly themed cadence, and update pipelines made that cadence sustainable rather than heroic.

What it produced

The sharpest proof was a four-year-old title most studios would have sunset. It went back into the top 20 of the US App Store, paid and free. The playbook was repeatable, which is the only reason it counts as a result rather than a story.