What can we learn from Riot Games’ cinematics?
Riot Games is the company behind the most popular online game in the world, League of Legends. Throughout the years the company managed to solidify their place in the market, staying relevant through different trends in PC gaming since 2009, being one of the few games to succeed in a “free-to-play” market strategy, making profit mostly from microtransactions, like selling skins for characters and trinkets. In the beginning, League of Legends was considered to be a worse quality version of other Multiplayer Online games that had either a subscription system or that you had to pay to even play the game at all, and they managed to reach such a great level of relevance due to their investments in marketing and e-sports.
With the ten-year anniversary of the game approaching, it's interesting for professionals in the area of social media and advertising to understand how Riot Games managed to keep their audience so loyal to the product, and also getting new consumers and always becoming relevant again. We'll see how they use their cinematics - storytelling videos of the characters in the game - as marketing, as well as a way of communicating with their customers.
The first cinematic they released was the official trailer for the game. In it, they showed some of the new champions they were releasing with the game, already opening doors for using that sort of media as advertising. These trailers, as well as their newest cinematic, "Awaken", are lore based. That means the videos have a direct dialogue with the world of League of Legends, and those are used to give a better insight of the characters to the players, that are able to see their favorite champions from a different angle, getting to know their personalities. Not only does that make the customers feel emotionally attached to the game, but also bring back gamers that haven't played for a while to experience the game again for nostalgia.
But Riot Games has a different approach that is probably what makes them so popular. Besides from the lore-based cinematics, they also have alternative universes. Those not only are the source of great profit to the company, as skins you can purchase online for characters are released for every one of those universes, but it's also a way of communicating with possible new customers. When they released the "KDA" skins, inspired by K-Pop girl bands, the success was so big that people that didn't even know the game were sharing and liking the video for the music that came along with the cinematic. In partnership with Madison Beer, (G)I-DLE and Jaira Burns, Riot Games brought four of their champions to life, singing and dancing to the new world trending genre of music. The video had in February of 2019 2.8 million likes and more than 171 million views. Countless dance cover videos been published on YouTube, and also cosplays on Instagram, turning KDA into a social media fever.
“The video had in February of 2019 2.8 million likes and more than 171 million views.”
In a nutshell, Riot Games was able to stay relevant for almost ten years in such a volatile environment as the online gaming community. They use cutting edge technology combined with creativity and artistic value, and market their products in a very subtle and efficient way. We can learn the lesson of knowing how to keep your audience always satisfied, interested and, most important of all, bringing fresh, quality content for the community and beyond.