Cutting the wait: How game teams are accelerating live ops

• Teams launching events in days and not weeks can react in real time and keep players engaged.
• Puzzle and casino games rely on frequent personalised events to stay at the top.

Antonina Belova is the growth & partnerships manager at Balancy.

For all its importance, live ops remains one of the slowest-moving parts of modern game development.

Even in well-resourced studios, event ideas can take weeks - or even months - to move from concept to live roll-out, stuck in engineering queues and weighed down by handoffs.

Product and monetisation teams plan meticulously, but without streamlined execution, their strategies lose momentum.

This isn’t just hearsay. Industry data underscores the stakes: in 2024, 84% of mobile in-app purchase revenue came from games that deploy live ops, and 95% of studios are now actively maintaining live-service titles. Live ops isn’t optional - it’s foundational.

From Adjust’s blog article “What is live ops? Best practices for live operations” – a visual overview of common live-ops types to implement. Source: Adjust

At the same time, the numbers fueling the market continue to climb. Global mobile game revenue hit $111.4 billion in 2024, with projections topping $130 billion in 2025, driven largely by titles that sustain engagement through fresh, frequent content.

From Tekrevol’s blog article “Mobile game revenue statistics” – a table showing global mobile game revenue growth from 2020 to the 2025 forecast. Source: Tekrevol.

Compounding the pressure, the most successful genres - puzzle and casino - rely heavily on event cadence. Together, they accounted for over 70% of the top 100 grossing games in H1 2025.

In markets where titles like Royal Match and Coin Master deliver multiple, personalised events per week, delays in execution translate directly into missed engagement windows and lost revenue.

From AppMagic data in InvestGame’s casual live ops report H1 2025 - charts showing genre and subgenre shares among the top-grossing global games in H1 2025, plus release year distribution. Source: InvestGame.

Why the drag feels so real

The challenge isn’t a lack of ideas - it’s the gap between strategy and execution.

Today’s players expect content tailored to their behaviour, refreshed continuously, and delivered seamlessly. Meanwhile, teams are experimenting more than ever - running pre-launch A/B tests, building segmented offers, and iterating on monetisation logic. Yet many still lack the operational agility to bring those ideas to market fast.

The bottleneck is almost always the same: execution. Even with strong live ops strategies in place, launching new content involves engineering, QA, asset pipelines, deployment schedules, and cross-department coordination. Each handoff is a potential delay.

From gridlock to agility: A shift in tooling philosophy

The industry’s response to this execution gap is evolving. Increasingly, studios are turning to tooling approaches designed to reduce engineering dependency and increase iteration speed.

This new generation of live ops solutions - whether custom-built or third-party - focuses on a few key principles:

• Pre-built foundations: Ready-to-use event or offer structures that can be adapted rather than built from scratch.

• Visual workflows: Tools that let teams configure UI elements, pricing, and triggers without code.

• Engine-agnostic SDKs: Frameworks designed to integrate with existing pipelines quickly, rather than requiring significant refactoring.

• Simulation and scheduling layers: Systems that allow live event previews, A/B testing, and automated deployment with less operational overhead.

Example of a visual live ops calendar with integrated simulation view for real-time event previews.

Balancy, for example, recently introduced an SDK and visual builder designed around these principles. While not the only solution in the space, it illustrates how tooling is shifting from static dashboards to dynamic systems that empower product and monetisation teams to experiment faster, personalise more deeply, and adapt while opportunities still matter.

Why speed is becoming strategy

For studios, the decision is no longer about whether to run live ops - but how fast they can run it.

The ability to shorten the distance between concept and live deployment is now a competitive differentiator. Teams that can test and launch events within days instead of weeks can react to player behaviour in real time, adapt to shifting market conditions, and keep engagement loops fresh.

Industry leaders are already moving in this direction. Teams at companies like Amanotes, Lion Studios, and Kwalee have embraced faster iteration cycles - whether through in-house tools or external platforms - enabling more frequent experimentation and more timely content updates.

Final word

Live ops drives the vast majority of revenue in mobile gaming, but its effectiveness depends entirely on execution speed.

As player expectations rise and competition intensifies, workflows that reduce integration from weeks to hours - and content deployment from sprints to minutes - will shift from nice-to-have to must-have.

The next phase of live ops innovation won’t just be about features or event types - it will be about how quickly and confidently teams can deliver them. And for studios ready to make that shift, the tools - and the mindset - are already here.