Hello all,
In 2019 the Path of Exile team gave a GDC conference talk in San Francisco. For those neckbeards among us, GDC was the pivot point between mud admins on the kanga.nu email list becoming MMO producers in 2000-2003. More recently, 2014-2016 presentations define modern game monetization and why the mobile app market is what it is. There are also game design post mortems from a surprising amount of Tier A and B MMO offerings.
I think there are some relevant points about release cycles, managing player retention, etc, as a small game studio. The crunchy bits are between 8min and 20min on this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM_5S55jUzk&t=1024s