What predictable delivery actually took

theHunter: Call of the Wild, Avalanche Studios Group. Executive Producer, January 2023 to October 2026, with full P&L ownership of the franchise.

The situation

I inherited a high-revenue live-service franchise six years past launch, with product growth flattening and unresolved technical risk carried on the roadmap. The mandate was to reverse the growth trend, secure long-term revenue against explicit growth criteria, and improve contribution margin into a softening market.

Three consecutive record financial years followed. What is worth writing down is not that number but the mechanics underneath it, because those are the part that transfers to a team of eight in month twelve of production.

How

1. Release cadence, gated on ROI

The franchise shipped quarterly, and success criteria varied from release to release. That makes it impossible to say whether a release worked, which makes it impossible to decide what to fund next.

  • Standardized performance targets and success criteria across DLC and free content, so releases became comparable to each other.
  • Built an ROI framework that gated investment bets, DLC scope and content development. A release that could not clear the bar was not funded.
  • Changed team composition to weight the value-generating work.

Result. Cadence moved from every three months to every two, without extending the release train, and a rising share of releases met their targets across three years.

2. Headcount against written business cases

Scaling is usually treated as an ambition. Treated that way, it adds coordination cost faster than output, and the team gets slower as it gets bigger.

  • Scaled only where a bottleneck had been identified and measured, or where output had not yet hit diminishing returns against player consumption rates.
  • Required every new role to carry a business case, written by the hiring manager, with an estimated value attached. No provable return, no approved hire.
  • Used the growth deliberately to open skill-development paths for people already on the team.

Result. 200% worldwide team growth with roadmap predictability held.

3. Validation before commitment

Live content and major technical upgrades ran in parallel. That is where live-service franchises usually destabilize, and the damage arrives after release, when it is most expensive.

  • Made player testing a gate on new features, forcing validation against player needs before build commitment.
  • Put automated telemetry in place to surface technical risk during development rather than after release.
  • Deliberately reduced release volatility and manual operations.

Result. 28% fewer dips in monthly active players between content drops.

4. Direction the directors could own

Predictable delivery is a governance outcome, not a personality outcome. If it depends on one person being in the room, it is not a system and it does not survive that person leaving.

  • Defined the long-term franchise roadmap as a set of strategic bets.
  • Built shared understanding of the player personas, so risk decisions were made against evidence rather than taste.
  • Held discipline directors accountable for their discipline's career development and longevity, not only its output.

Result. Strategy legible enough that the discipline directors could run against it without me in the room.

The principles underneath it

  • Stay relevant and competitive.
  • Transparency and early risk exposure. Status is binary; amber is a decision someone is avoiding.
  • Build resilient systems rather than relying on individuals.
  • Alignment enables autonomy. Autonomy unleashes creativity.

What I would do differently

I stabilized the system before I understood the people, and it cost me time. I went straight to the production layer — cadence, success criteria, governance — because that was the fastest route to a predictable P&L, and it worked. But I ran it from the reporting for too long.

I should have spent standing time with the discipline leads on the floor in the first months, watching the work and hearing their take on it, rather than waiting for the data to tell me. Decisions I made in year two were decisions I could have made months earlier if I had asked earlier.

I now treat the opening sixty days of any mandate as scheduled listening, not optional listening: a recurring hour with each discipline lead, held regardless of what else is on fire.

Why this is on a site selling advice to eight-person teams

None of the above needs a franchise to be true. Comparable success criteria, a written case behind each hire, validation before commitment, and a direction the team can run without you are what separate a project that ships on a defensible date from one that discovers its scope the hard way. The budget changes. The mechanics do not.

This is also the honest version of the pitch: I have already made the mistakes you are about to make, including the one at the top of this section.

Get in touch