Connecting global communities with live experiences
BY KEV KATONA | MAY 5, 2024
I love finding excuses to bring people together, so when the team at Riot Games asked me to help deliver the future of global gaming events, I knew we were about to do something special.
Building on the success of its global esports phenomenon League of Legends, Riot Games was looking to elevate its popular new game VALORANT by connecting its global communities with live experiences.
All we had to do was stand up three new international content platforms powered by dozens of partnered brands and then host a series of multi-million dollar events around the world. No pressure!
(Okay maybe a little bit of pressure…)
Thankfully I had already managed an international project with the team over at Minecraft, and so I leaned on the same project phases for VALORANT:
1. Initiating – I review the business case and feasibility of the project, working with stakeholders to compile a project charter that aligns everyone on the high-level scope, schedule, deliverables, and constraints.
2. Planning – Once the charter is approved by leadership, I work with the team to flesh out stakeholders, roles & responsibilities, scope breakdown, resources/budget, and communication standards.
3. Execution – Then over the course of months, or sometimes years, I work alongside the team to deliver the artifacts, tools, and policies that collectively form the final output of the project. Things inevitably change during the course of a project, so I spend some of this time making adjustments so that discovered work, market changes, and any other complications are accounted for.
4. Closing – Once the project is done, I invite stakeholders to a project retrospective where we discuss what went right and where we can improve so that future projects are even more successful.
This process removed a lot of delivery risks and allowed us to focus on what mattered most: developing amazing live experiences for Riot’s global fandoms.
We just had one big question left to answer: who is going to help us do this?
In my experience, selecting the right brand partners has been crucial for engaging a global audience, but how can you know that you’ve made the right selections?
In VALORANT’s case I used three tactics that worked fairly well:
1. Understand your heuristics – Having already established League of Legends as a global esports powerhouse, the team at Riot wasted no time selecting a handful of heuristics that we would use to measure each potential partner.
2. Craft a clear RFP – I then crafted an external-facing pitch deck with help from Riot’s legal and marketing teams. My top priorities were to make a compelling sale, yes, but also to communicate how we would be evaluating these brands and our timeline expectations.
3. Build a data pipeline – I produced a dashboard using Google Sheets that could track the applicants for each of our three international platforms. This dashboard displayed the status of the overall selection process, comparisons between each platform’s applicant pool, and even data-driven scoring as teams were graded based on application materials and interviews.
In less than 6 months from my first day with Riot, we were able to finalize partnerships for all three international content platforms. By choosing brands that maximized performance, marketing reach, and business viability, we built a global ecosystem that catered to fans with localized marketing while also delivering a shared global experience.
The end result was VALORANT’s historic 2023 season, earning honors as the “2023 Esports Game of the Year” by the Esports Game Awards and delighting millions of fans around the world.
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I should note that this article doesn’t cover the full spectrum of challenges that we faced while working on VALORANT. From designing global event calendars to managing partner relationships to planning all-hands meetings, I supported the team however I could to maintain the reputation Riot had built as a global gaming powerhouse.
To hear more about my work with Riot Games or how live events can support a global brand, be sure to connect with me on LinkedIn.