Mobile Game LiveOps Is a Marathon.
Don’t Let Your Tech Stack Trip You Up.

Launching a mobile game is just the beginning of the marathon. You’ve barely left Greenwich (or Hopkinton, for our American friends). The real test lies in sustaining its success once launched, as anyone with a live mobile game can attest. And for a live game, you need LiveOps. It’s not just about keeping the game running. It’s about driving engagement, maintaining revenue, and constantly improving the player experience. While that’s going on, you’ve still got to handle a tech stack that grows more complex by the day. So what’s a studio to do?

The Cost of Cutting Corners in Game Development

Most games today are built to ship fast. MVPs, soft launches, early access; the pressure is on to release early, test live, and iterate fast.

But that pressure to just get it out often leads to a painful reality: foundational systems are rushed, corners are cut, and best practices are deferred with good intentions to “clean it up later.”

Then the launch happens. Then the ongoing effort to maintain/build upon success happens. And “later” never comes.

The Consequences of Shipping Fast and Fixing Never

In the rush to launch and the chaos of Live Ops, it’s easy to build up tech debt without even realising it. And eventually, the cost of that debt will show up. Everywhere!

• New features take longer to build and test
• Bugs creep into places no one expected
• Tooling and automation were never built, and now you need them
• The engineering backlog begins to grow faster than it’s being cleared
• Burnout increases, and velocity drops

You’ve probably heard lines like:

“We can’t fix this right now; we’ve got a live event next week!” “Errr… let’s just patch it for now.” “It was never supposed to scale like this!”

I’ve seen this firsthand. One partner we worked with had a hugely successful live game, but every patch was taking over 8 hours to ship. Years of changes and reactive updates meant that every release triggered a veritable gauntlet of validation steps, manual checks, and fragile systems that could break at any moment.

Our Wizards stepped in and modernised their workflows, refactored brittle code paths, and introduced automation to catch regressions early. As a result of our work, they went from 8 hours to 1 hour per patch. Same team, same game; just now with a healthier tech foundation.

The Bigger Problem: Success Makes It Worse

Ironically, success makes everything harder to fix.

The more players you have, the riskier it feels to make structural changes. The more revenue is tied to the live service, the less flexibility you have to pause and refactor. And the more deadlines you face—events, promotions, feature drops—the harder it is to prioritise clearing that tech debt.

Another recent client of ours had a 10-year-old live game. Their players were loyal and asking for new features, but the backend couldn’t support them. The team knew exactly what they wanted to build, but legacy systems handcuffed them.

We partnered with them to design and build a new backend platform, carefully migrating them over while the game stayed live. The result was a future-ready foundation that unblocked their roadmap and gave them the ability to scale confidently for years to come.

Even AAA Hits Face the Same Challenge

When we worked with Respawn on APEX Legends, we helped migrate the backend services that power the game across multiple regions globally. They have a brilliant team, who have been running the game for a long time. The Respawn team have always wanted to improve observability in their processes.

We rebuilt parts of their backend stack, introduced much-needed observability, and created a cleaner, more maintainable platform. It was a major technical lift, but it enabled their team to gain additional control over their operations and make future updates with confidence. Read the full case study.

What Can Be Done: A Focused, Strategic Tech Debt Cleanup

The answer isn’t a rewrite. It’s about a targeted, strategic cleanup that frees up your team to ship again without fear.

At Code Wizards Group, here’s how we approach it:

• Tactical backlog clearance: Fix what’s slowing you down right now.
• Strategic tech debt removal: Identify and rebuild the most brittle systems.
• Developer tooling and workflow improvements: Let your team move faster, safer.
• Backend scalability reviews: Ensure your architecture can keep up with success.
• CI/CD Modernisation: Make your build-and-ship pipeline fast and reliable.

You don’t need to rewrite the game. You need to stabilise the foundation, so your team can build again with confidence.

Let’s Make Live Ops Sustainable

Live service games are a marathon, and your team is already running hard.

We’re just here to make sure they’re no longer running with weights strapped to their ankles.

Addressing deep tech debt doesn’t mean adding long-term headcount. In fact, the best approach is often a short-term spike in capacity, a focused external team working hand-in-hand with your developers to clean up the mess while your core team keeps the game running.

These engagements typically last a few weeks to a few months. They’re scoped, efficient, and designed to leave your codebase, backend, and workflows in a measurably better place than they were before. And, done right, they remove the need for long-term overhead.

It’s not about replacing your team or saying they can’t do this themselves. It’s about unblocking them, so they can do their best work again.

Unless you enjoy hiring… just to fire later.

If you’re juggling live events, struggling with patch velocity, or finding it increasingly difficult to ship features, please reach out. We’ll help you clean up the tech debt and make Live Ops sustainable for your team and your game. Both now and for the future.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn by Matthew Morris.