VALORANT Console Beta Launch
Game time is better with people you know! When launching VALORANT on consoles, we created an experience leveraging user relationships, leading to record growth in engagement and revenue.
What Gets Players Hyped To Play Together? Shared Experience And Community!
To create hype around their launch on Playstation and XBOX, VALORANT wanted to drive engagement through trusted relationships.
What methods would help a historically PC game like VALORANT, maximize outcome when expanding to a new console player-base.
There were some core goals:
Drive users previously unable to play the game, to a new experience alongside players they know.
Increase an already strong VALORANT community.
Engaging with friends = Happy Players.
This leads to play growth via engagement and retention.
The more they are happy playing, the more they spend hard earned money!
What were the choices made before landing on the final outcome?
The "Perfect Experience" would be something that was simple, safe and reliable, scalable, and gave us the control levers to easily deliver this experience to a huge audience.
I focused on flows that allowed us to reuse functionalities in multiple instances. This reduced the scope of unique logic and one-off situations our engineers needed to build.
The landing page was designed not only for registration details, but also to provide links to content about the game, and account for getting new and existing players hyped.
What hurdles or pivots arose which changed the path?
The ideal experience hit a snag wanting to rely on our internal system logic, to control and validate user access, reducing friction to get in game. But our external partners needed us to use a flow with access codes, which added a little user friction. This turned out fine given it's an expected experience on other products.
Early on, I made a point to attempt to reduce bad actors selling unusable codes to excited players, by bringing the invitation process into the user account management. Unfortunately upon exploration, this would greatly increase the project scope, so teh concept was punted the capabilities to a future project.
Aligned MVP Solution
Redeeming A Shared Code
Redeeming a code shared by your friend, needed to be as simple as registration. The flow was the same, except the landing page had a unique code tied reflecting the registered user it came from. The friend just needed to log in, choose their platform, and you're ready to play!
What was the result?
The launch on console was a HUGE success. The hypothesis that users would play longer when they have a unique experience to share together, was validated. The game recorded huge growth in user base, time spent in game, and revenue - all directly tied to ease of use.
