The attention problem: Outfit7’s Urška Leskovar on rethinking live ops

• Copying a fix from one game to another often just wastes resources, since two titles can share the same symptom for different reasons.
• Outfit7 once added more content to fix an engagement dip and saw no improvement, proving content isn't always the answer.
• A large audience gives you more data, but it can also hide real problems within a smaller segment of players.

Many live mobile games don't suffer from a content shortage, they suffer from an attention shortage.

That's the premise behind Outfit7 senior lead product manager Urška Leskovar's upcoming talk at Pocket Gamer Connects Nordics, which takes place on October 20th and 21st.

The talk aims to challenge the common assumption that retention and engagement problems can be solved through content production alone. Instead, it explores how player attention becomes one of the most constrained resources in long-running live games, and why helping players focus may be more valuable than giving them more to do.

Ahead of her talk, we caught up with Leskovar to discuss portfolio strategy, why "add more content" isn't always the fix for flagging engagement and how teams can tell an attention problem from a content problem.

Pocketgamer.biz: You've managed a portfolio of live games rather than just one. What does portfolio-level thinking teach you that running a single title just can't?

Urška Leskova: It requires a more macro approach, where you need to think about where to put your effort to achieve the biggest impact. Of course, the same principle applies to a single title, where you want to focus on the things that will have the greatest impact, but with a portfolio you start seeing patterns and behaviours across games that might not be visible otherwise.

Different titles can face very different challenges, and you need to recognise those differences and address them appropriately. Something that works very well for one game might not work at all for another, while on other occasions, a breakthrough on one game can absolutely be relevant to a different title as well.

In my experience, portfolio thinking teaches you that the same symptom rarely has the same cause. 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. It also forces you to think not just about what could work, but where your effort is most likely to make a difference.

Live ops teams default to "add more" when engagement dips. When did you first notice that instinct wasn't actually working?

Honestly, it has been a lot of trial and error. We made the mistake in the not-so-recent past of thinking that adding more content would solve a problem, but it didn't. Despite investing significant resources into it, we didn't see a meaningful improvement in the engagement metrics we were trying to influence.

For me, that's a very clear signal that you need to stop and reassess. If you add a meaningful amount of content and it doesn't move the metrics you expected it to, you have to ask whether you're addressing the wrong problem or whether the solution itself wasn't right.

Ultimately, our job is to provide value to the player. If we're not seeing evidence that we're creating an improved experience, we need to understand why before we invest even more into the same approach.

That's where data becomes important, but not in the sense of simply looking at dashboards and following whatever number moves. Data doesn't give you the answer automatically; it gives you evidence to challenge your assumptions and make less instinctive, more informed decisions.

Across Outfit7's games, is there a common moment in a title's lifecycle where the team's instinct to add content is strongest - and most likely to be wrong?

There isn't really a one-size-fits-all answer, but if I had to generalise, I'd say it often happens as games mature and the team starts interpreting declining engagement as a signal that players need more fresh content.

That can absolutely be true, but I think the better question to ask at that point is: why aren't the things that already exist in the game compelling enough?

If players are staying with the game for a long time and engagement is healthy, but you start seeing signs of fatigue among your most loyal players, then adding new content can be exactly the right approach. Even a great gameplay loop can become stale for loyal players, so giving them new experiences is important.

On the other hand, 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. It could be an onboarding issue, an economy or progression problem, friction in the core experience, or something else entirely.

The key is not to assume that the same symptom always has the same cause.

Managing multiple live titles at once means constant trade-offs for the same finite team. How do you decide which game gets attention this quarter, and which one waits?

The simple answer is that we want to invest where we believe we can achieve the most impact.

In practice, there are several factors we look at:

• Where can we improve the player experience significantly?
• Where can the investment change the trajectory of the game in the most meaningful way?
• What does it cost us to achieve that impact?
• What role does this game play within the broader portfolio?

Commercial impact matters, but it isn't the only consideration. Sometimes a game is strategically important beyond its immediate financial return.

Those factors don't make the decision automatic, but they give us a framework for making the trade-offs deliberately. With finite resources, it's ultimately about understanding where our attention and investment can have the greatest leverage.

"Attention shortage" is a player-side problem, but studios often treat it as a content-supply problem internally. Are studios solving for what's easy to ship rather than what players actually need?

Absolutely. Teams have an attention problem too. We can get so focused on delivering the roadmap that we stop asking whether we're still solving the problem the player actually has.

You can also be constrained by budgets, timelines, production capacity and other practical realities, and sometimes a good idea gets gradually reduced until what you're actually shipping no longer solves the problem it was intended to solve.

That's particularly dangerous when the team is still focused on shipping something simply because it was on the roadmap. 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.

That's why I think it's important to have regular checkpoints throughout development where the team challenges whether what we're building still makes sense.

Peer reviews, expert reviews and simply asking the uncomfortable questions can be valuable: are we still solving the original problem? Has the scope been reduced to the point where the solution no longer matters? And, perhaps most importantly, would the player actually notice or care about this?

Franchise games like Talking Tom carry huge built-in audiences. Does that scale make the attention vs content problem easier to diagnose, or does it hide it for longer?

It's definitely a double-edged sword.

Having a very large audience gives you a huge volume of data to work with, which can make it easier to identify patterns and understand player behaviour. But scale can also mask problems that might become more significant over time. If you have millions of players still interacting with your game, a relatively small dip in retention or engagement can look insignificant at first.

You also have to be careful with aggregate numbers, because a large audience is made up of many different player segments with different behaviours and motivations. What looks stable at the overall level might be changing quite significantly within a particular segment.

So I think assuming that audience size automatically means quality attention is a mistake. A large audience is obviously valuable, but we still need to understand the quality of that engagement and what is actually driving it. Otherwise, the scale itself can make it harder to see what's really happening.

If a mid-sized studio doesn't have Outfit7's data or portfolio scale, what's the smallest, cheapest signal they could look for to tell whether they have a content problem or an attention problem?

I would start with a very simple question: what are players actually engaging with in the game today?

If your game already has plenty of content and you see players only engaging with one or two features, while ignoring the rest, that can be a potentially strong signal that you are facing an attention shortage rather than a content shortage.

Additionally, you can look at what happens when you introduce a new feature. Does it create a genuine incremental difference in the game, or are you simply taking attention away from other parts?

You don't need a huge data science setup to answer those questions. 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.

Your PGC Nordics is on live ops optimisation. What's one thing a live ops team could stop building tomorrow, without losing players, that would prove your point?

My advice would be to stop automatically adding another event whenever engagement dips. Players don't need more to do. They need a reason to care.

Events aren't inherently bad, and they can be a very effective way of keeping a live game fresh. But if the first response to declining engagement is always to add another event, you're assuming the problem is a lack of things to do before you've actually established that it is.

In some cases, the better experiment might be to remove something that players aren't engaging with and see what happens. If nobody notices that it's gone, you've learned something valuable: the problem wasn't that players needed more content. You were already asking them to divide their attention across something they didn't need.

Catch Urška Leskovar's talk, 'Players Aren't Leaving Because You Lack Content', at PGC Nordics - get your ticket.