Balance patch
A live-ops update that adjusts game balance numbers (damage, cost, drop rate, progression curve) without changing the gameplay code.
Balance patches are the most frequent change in a live game. Most ship every week or two. The numbers live in spreadsheets or JSON tables that designers edit, with engineering pulling the latest values into the build. The risk: balance numbers reference each other across documents. A 10% nerf to a unit's damage interacts with cost, with progression speed, with the related boss-encounter difficulty curve, with the loot drop tables that use the unit as a reward.
Most studios catch balance-patch breakage in QA. Some catch it in production. The cost of a broken balance patch shipped to live players is high: refund waves, retention drop, sometimes a full rollback. Studios with a single misaligned cell in a balance spreadsheet have shipped patches that crashed retention by double digits.
GameFrame's 11 AI review personas analyze a balance change against the rest of the design data and surface impacted documents before merge. The same workflow applies to narrative and GDD changes.