In case of products under continuous development, such as mobile games, (a) the development workload for bug fixing is accompanied by (b) the development workload of new content, which exhausts development teams. This paper examined a case of a company where (a) some developers suffered exhaustion while responding to bugs pointed out by users. However, many of the bugs were related to specific events and items. Thus, the company chose not to include the bug fixes in quick updates as long as they were not emergencies related to the game system. In addition, (b) initially PvE (Player versus Environment) content comprised 70% of the new content, whereas PvP (Player versus Player) content comprised 30%. However, the consumption of PvE content was faster than originally estimated, resulting in exhaustion of the development team. By contrast, PvP content was generated primarily by users, and additions to content were not frequent, although considerable time was needed to validate the content. For validation, simulations of portions of user fights were conducted, which indicated reduction of time by approximately 35%; in addition, the ratios of PvE and PvP content were changed to 40% and 60%, respectively. Through (a) and (b), the feeling of exhaustion experienced by the development teams was ameliorated, and by increasing the proportion of PvP, which had a high social component, the company succeeded in acquiring new users and monetizing existing paid users.
An organization is said to be in an activated state if “(1) the members have a common purpose and (2) they are actively willing to contribute action to accomplish this common purpose” (Takahashi, 1992). Problem solvers that fulfill requirements (1) and (2) play an active role in an activated state. At Company A, which is discussed in this paper and was in a crisis with its performance, employees demonstrated initiative to activate the organization by pursuing Product Identity rather than corporate identity with regard to (1) above. Moreover, this activation started to expand to other companies because of its nature as Product Identity.