It is dangerous to scale a game with questionable product/market fit because of The Traction Treadmill. Sometimes players show up in your game, and a small percentage of them retains.
You may think it’s time to scale. Just add players, instead of improving your game. And this works, for a time. You can grow fast just by doubling ad spend. Or tripling ad spend.
You have 10.000 players, you buy 20.000 more.
Then a large percentage of those players go away and never returns back. You have to replace the percentage you lost plus buy more players to grow. You lose a percentage of players fast, and you have the budget and funding to replace them- but then can’t keep grow on top!
You may want to optimize your campaigns and spend less per Player. But inevitably the problem will reappear at some point. Team’s morale will do down as options become scarce. Increase retention becomes too slow and complex.
That is why is extremely important to polish your product but also understand when you cannot fix it. Also the best companies in the world know when to kill projects.