When support is withdrawn, the title stays
A partner, publisher or parent steps back, or the team is cut. The title, its roadmap and its players do not go away, and live operations still have to keep running.
How a pod works
A pod is a standing team that takes a defined part of your live roadmap and is accountable for delivering it. It is built for the point where a partner steps back or your team gets smaller and the live roadmap still has to ship.
What goes wrong without one
Delivery nobody owns
Many external parties work on the title, and none of them is accountable for what ships and when.
Capacity bought by the seat
External people are priced and managed as individual seats, so the conversation is about cost per head instead of outcome.
Who is in it
A pod is four people. Everyone has a games background and at least one shipped live title.
- Lead
- A product-minded builder. Your counterpart: owns scope, priorities and the weekly report to you, and builds hands-on.
- Two seniors
- Working AI-first. Code, UI/UX engineering or live data, depending on the scope.
- One live-ops profile
- Covers live operations on the same scope.
A way to start
You do not have to begin with a full pod. You can begin with a single builder-lead engagement of two to three months. The lead takes a bounded part of your roadmap and ships it, and writes down what a pod would deliver next.
The contract states that the engagement can grow into a pod if you want to continue.
It is also a way to put a builder-lead on one bounded part of the live roadmap while you decide what comes next. That is often after a partner withdraws or the team is cut.
Where it works
The pod is embedded with your team or works remotely. When you are in Europe, it sits with you three full days a week. When you are in another time zone, it works remotely with overlapping core hours agreed with you.
You provide devkits, licences and source control.
What the contract says
We do not sell hours and we do not sell CVs. We sell a defined part of your live roadmap, delivered on time and reported on, and that is written into the agreement.
- A scope description per quarter
- What the pod is responsible for, in writing, before the quarter starts.
- Defined deliverables with dates
- Each deliverable has a date. The weekly report is measured against them.
{{OWNER: contract template (notice period, IP, non-solicitation) is not yet written. Add public terms here only once the lawyer has signed off the template.}}
Who it is for
For
- Production leadership in a studio or live unit: studio director, executive producer, head of live.
- Titles that are post-launch, on PC and console, at AA or AAA scale, where the live roadmap has to keep shipping.
- Studios and live units that have lost a partner, a publisher or a parent, or been through a reduction. Live operations have to keep running.
- Established studios and the publishers funding them.
Not for
- Titles heading into an expansion phase.
- Mobile.
- Body-shop staffing: hours or CVs without accountability for delivery.
- Single seats with no route to a pod. The only single-person engagement we offer is the way in described below, with a pod written down as the next step.
How we hold ourselves to it
Alexander Strandberg is the founder and owns the client relationship. He does not lead pods; the lead owns daily delivery. Each pod has a monthly internal review with him against the same report you receive. If a pod is behind two months in a row, we change the lead.
The people
Steadystate is run by Alexander Strandberg, in Malmö. He has worked in live service since 2008 and in games since 2014. At Avalanche Studios Group he was Studio Lead and Executive Producer on theHunter: Call of the Wild. He held production leadership at Ubisoft Massive and was Production Director at Sharkmob on Exoborne.
The people in your pod are named in the proposal for your title.