Outfit7: attention shortage, not content shortage, is draining live ops budgets
Summary
Outfit7 invested significant resources adding content to fix an engagement dip, saw no metric improvement, and stopped
Senior lead PM Urška Leskovar reframes the problem: most live mobile games face an attention shortage, not a content gap
Portfolio pattern: identical retention drops routinely have different root causes, making copy-paste fixes a resource sink
"Two games may show identical retention drops for completely different reasons, which means copying solutions between titles is often the fastest way to waste resources."
01
"Add more content" is most tempting when it is most likely wrong
Instinct to ship content peaks as games mature and engagement dips - exactly when fundamentals may be the real issue
Leskovar splits two failure modes: late-journey fatigue among loyal players (content helps) vs. early-journey churn (onboarding, economy, progression)
Outfit7's own case: significant content investment produced no meaningful metric movement, triggering a reassessment rather than doubling down
"If you're seeing significant churn early in the player journey, that's a signal to investigate the fundamentals before assuming that more content is the answer."
02
The cheapest diagnostic any studio can run without data science
If players concentrate on one or two features and ignore the rest, that is an attention shortage, not a content gap
Second test: measure whether a new feature creates incremental engagement or just cannibalises attention from existing features
Inverse test: remove something players ignore; if no one notices, the team was already over-asking for attention
"Even basic engagement data can tell you whether players are asking for more things to do, or whether you're already competing for more of their attention than you realise."
03
Talking Tom scale hides segment-level decline in aggregate stability
Franchise-scale audiences create a diagnostic blind spot: segment deterioration looks statistically insignificant against millions of active players
Assuming audience size equals healthy engagement delays diagnosis and extends wasted investment
Aggregate numbers mask that a large base contains segments with different behaviours and motivations moving in different directions
04
Outfit7's four-filter framework for portfolio live ops trade-offs
Filters applied per title: magnitude of player experience improvement, trajectory impact, cost to achieve it, strategic role in the portfolio
Commercial return is separated from strategic value - some titles justify investment beyond immediate financial contribution
Same logic at feature level: checkpoints ask whether scope cuts have degraded a feature below the threshold that justified building it
"You can end up with an update that is technically delivered, but doesn't provide enough value to justify the resources that went into it."
05
Stop auto-triggering an event every time engagement dips
Leskovar's concrete recommendation: reflexively shipping an event assumes a content problem before establishing one exists
If the new event only redistributes attention from existing content, it confirms volume was never the constraint
"Players don't need more to do. They need a reason to care."
What this means
For Publishers & Developers: Before greenlighting the next content sprint, run the engagement-concentration test - it may kill the roadmap item
For Service Vendors: Content-production pitches lose leverage against studios adopting attention diagnostics; reposition around feature-level impact measurement
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