When a product starts growing, the team has to grow with it. And this is where many founders experience a hard reality check: a company behaves very differently at different scales. Managing 15–20 people is one thing. Running a team of 30 feels completely different. And when you reach 100+, the entire system changes again. To add to that, every transition happens in a new, completely different way.
A short backstory aka the prologue
At one point in the past, after nearly ten years of independent development, Rockbite Games was close to shutting down. The money from their first hit, along with dozens of smaller projects, had run out. Burn rate was high. The studio was struggling to survive.
Today, the team is working on Idle Outpost, which has surpassed 20 million installs and reached top revenue positions in its niche. But success brought a new set of challenges, the kind every studio faces when scaling to support a rapidly growing live product.
Back in 2010, founders Avetis Zakharyan and Gevorg Kopalyan quit their jobs, pooled $2,000 each, hired two more people, and started building games — something they had always dreamed of doing.
Over time, they released dozens of projects, gradually improving in quality, until they launched the idle game Deep Town, which is still featured in Google Play’s Editors’ Choice. The project eventually earned over $5 million, but that success also introduced new challenges. It’s hard to say whether the studio would have reached its current level without going through those earlier mistakes and hard lessons.
The studio moved into a much, much larger office, renovated it in the style of major game companies, and scaled up operations. But they couldn’t launch another hit. At one point, they were spending more on user acquisition than the game was earning. High burn rate, office costs, and a lack of deep marketing and analytics expertise created serious pressure.
With only a few months of runway left, the team realized something fundamental was missing, despite strong products and a genuine passion for game development. They began considering publishing partnerships, even though they initially had many doubts and fears about it.
Long story short: our joint prototype eventually became Idle Outpost, the project that took off, dominated its niche, and triggered rapid studio growth.
New challenges
When your product scales, your team inevitably must scale too. Anyone who has grown a company from 20–30 people to 60–100 knows how painful these transitions are. Processes break. Communication shifts. Roles change. Priorities realign. Small teams usually don’t think about this in advance.
One of the first pain points fast-growing studios encounter is QA. In small teams, where everyone wears multiple hats and knows the product inside out, QA is often treated casually, sometimes even dismissed altogether. You’ll hear things like: “If we build it properly, we won’t need QA.” On large projects, this simply isn’t true.
Another common misconception is that QA is an “easy entry role” into the industry, which leads to underinvesting in hiring strong specialists. In a serious live project, professional QA is not optional. Bugs are inevitable. Critical bugs directly impact all core metrics. Find great specialists, and QA will pay for itself.
The second major shift is organizational complexity. Early on, founders are everything: CTOs, leads, developers, designers, producers. Once the team reaches 60+ people, that model collapses. You need an entirely new management layer, because no one can oversee everything anymore.
This is psychologically difficult. Founders are used to doing everything themselves. Letting go of critical responsibilities feels risky. It often feels like no one understands the product better than you, especially when hiring externally.
Some studios try to grow managers internally, which can work, but it comes with pitfalls. A common pattern is promoting strong specialists into leadership roles. But being a great engineer or designer doesn’t automatically translate into being a great manager. These are fundamentally different skill sets. Some people thrive at combining hard and soft skills. Many don’t, and end up stressed, unhappy, or ineffective. If you want to grow leaders internally, it’s important to identify those with real management potential early.
Third, development workflows must change. When everything revolves around founders, parallel development eventually becomes impossible. In larger studios, some teams focus on major features, others handle LiveOps, and others work on technical improvements.
All of this requires structured coordination, again, through a dedicated management layer.
Producers take ownership of streams. Teams operate semi-independently. This is where studios usually realize they lack experienced leads and managers.
The market is highly competitive. Attracting strong specialists means offering compelling conditions, especially when competing with established studios with strong brands. Even if you grow a few managers internally, it’s rarely enough when scaling from a dozen people to several dozen or more.
What to do — and how to prepare early
The best-prepared teams are those who’ve already lived through this process. Over-preparing before you even have a successful product can be counterproductive. Thinking too far ahead may distract from what matters right now. But being aware of what’s coming is incredibly valuable. Some practical steps: don’t ignore specialized roles early, document workflows from the start for easier onboarding, build processes that can later be delegated, connect with strong professionals early, and gradually build your studio brand — even through simple dev updates
When scaling becomes inevitable, one of the smartest decisions is bringing in external support. It’s hard to overstate how many problems this can prevent, and how much faster growth becomes when experienced partners share years of accumulated expertise. Not just doing work for you, but transferring knowledge. These tips on choosing the right partner can help you avoid disappointment down the road.
One key mindset shift for founders: Be ready to break systems and rebuild them. Repeatedly. Every management structure only works at a specific scale. Not because it’s bad, but because it’s optimized for a certain moment in growth.
Many founders delay change because it feels scary or unnecessary. “It worked before — why won’t it keep working?” Because scale changes everything.
And once your product becomes large, or you have multiple products, your founder role fundamentally shifts. Your product is no longer a single game. Your product becomes the company.
That’s the founder mindset shift — success is no longer one hit game, but a company that can consistently build great products.
In small studios, everything is fused together and founders live close to the product. In larger organizations with several products, the founder’s job becomes attracting strong leaders, building culture, and designing systems where hits can be created repeatedly. Trying to personally control everything no longer solves problems, it only postpones them. At some point, you have to let go. Trust strong people to do what they do best, and focus on creating the conditions where they can succeed.
