When Everything Is on Fire: How to Prioritize in Live Games

Saying no is good advice. But it is not the advice you need when you are staring at four fires at once and all of them are real. If you have not read the original post on focus, that is a good place to start. This post picks up where that one left off.

In my current game, the top of the funnel is broken. We are losing roughly 2% of DAU every month. Revenue targets still have to be hit. Live ops is inconsistent. And the game looks visually dated. None of these are made-up concerns. None of them can be quietly deprioritized.

The mistake I see most often in situations like this is not that PMs fail to say no. It is that they either freeze and circle in conversation without deciding anything, or they try to move on everything at once and end up with five half-finished efforts that move no metric meaningfully. Both paths produce the same outcome: motion without progress.

What actually helps is understanding the type of problem you are dealing with, because type determines sequence. Almost every problem in a live game traces back to one of three categories: an operating problem (the team lacks the rhythm and structure to run the business), a product problem (the game has gaps in features, funnel, or quality), or a business problem (revenue or retention is underperforming against targets). These categories have different time horizons, different owners, and different sequencing dependencies. The order is not arbitrary.

Operating Problems Come First

In the situation above, the most tempting thing to fix first was the funnel. Losing 2% DAU monthly is visible, quantifiable, and directly tied to the business. Every instinct says start there.

But the root cause was upstream. Live ops was not running with a consistent rhythm. We had no clear expected outcomes set before events went live. Signal detection was reactive. The team was spending cycles on recovery instead of optimization.

Fixing the funnel on top of a broken operating model would have been like patching a roof while the foundation is cracking. You might slow the leak temporarily, but the instability compounds everything you build on top of it.

An operating problem is structural, not motivational. It shows up as teams circling the same conversations without decisions, metrics monitored but never acted on with precision, and priorities that shift based on whoever spoke last. The fix is installing a rhythm, defining expected outcomes before work goes live, and building the discipline to compare actuals against those outcomes every week. I cover exactly how to build that system in How to Run a Live Service Game.

Business Survival Runs in Parallel

Fixing your operating model takes time. The business does not pause while you do it.

The right answer is running two tracks simultaneously with clear ownership and no contamination between them.

Track one: stabilize the business. Hit the revenue floor. Protect near-term monetization. The default mistake here is catering exclusively to high spenders because they are the loudest signal in the data. That is a trap. Over-indexing on whales at the expense of mid-tier and casual payers leaves significant revenue unrealized and accelerates the DAU decline you are already trying to stop. Sustainable monetization requires maintaining opportunity across the full player base.

Track two: fix the foundation. Install the operating rhythm. Define expected outcomes. Build the signal detection practice that lets you distinguish a real problem from noise before it compounds.

The moment everyone is pulled onto the business fire, the operating work stalls. The moment the operating work becomes a reason to delay business decisions, you miss quarters you cannot recover.

Product Quality Is a Continuous Track, Not a Project

The game looks dated. The visual language has not kept up with the market. This is a real problem for acquisition and first impressions, but it is also the kind of problem that absorbs unlimited resources if you treat it as a big bang effort.

The right frame is a continuous improvement track that moves with every release. Each new feature ships with updated visual standards. Each new event advances the art direction incrementally. Over time the game modernizes without requiring a freeze on everything else. Slower and less satisfying than a clean redesign announcement, but the only version compatible with a live game that has to keep moving.

Top of Funnel Comes Last

The sequencing mistake I see most often is investing in acquisition before the underlying game is ready to retain what acquisition brings.

If we are losing 2% DAU monthly, that is a retention problem. Spending more on the top of the funnel to compensate is not a fix. It is an accelerant. You bring more players in, they hit the same broken experience, and you now have a higher-cost version of the same outcome.

Top of funnel investment makes sense when you have evidence the game can hold players once they arrive. Until then, fix what you are keeping before you optimize what you are catching.

The Sequencing Framework

When I am staring at a stack of problems, I run through four questions in order:

• Is there an operating problem underneath this? If yes, that comes first.
• What needs to be true to buy us more time? That runs in parallel.
• What can improve incrementally with each release? That becomes a continuous track.
• What requires stability to work? That gets sequenced after the foundation is solid.

These are not competing priorities on a single list. They run on different clocks with different owners and different success criteria. The discipline is resisting the urge to collapse them into one overwhelmed backlog.

Closing Thought

The previous post was about saying no. This one is about something harder: knowing what to say yes to first. Progress in a broken system does not come from finding the one move that fixes everything. It comes from small, deliberate improvements on each track, compounding over time. That is what a functioning operating rhythm actually gives you: not certainty, but a clear sequence. The teams that navigate pressure well are not the ones with the best instincts about what to fix. They are the ones with the clearest thinking about what to fix first.