UX Lead
Game time is better with people you know!
When launching VALORANT on consoles, we wanted to create an experience leveraging user relationships, leading to record growth in engagement and revenue. This enabled us to create an experience that drew in new players because players they knew were participating.
Whether players were enticed from game content creators they follow, or personal connections looking to experience something on a new platform, that participation signal from trusted sources drove engagement.
1-Problem Statement
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!
2-The Process
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.
3-Hurdles / Pivots
What hurdles or pivots arose and changed our path?
With the ideal experience, we hoped to improving on other experiences, and reduce friction accessing the build.
What happened?
It turned out our console partners wanted to control access to download the build.
This required providing keys to the user, which they'd input in the console store to download the game build.
Though the goal is the optimal user experience, the pivot to added friction wasn't a huge miss for our users given the similar flow in other products.
Integrating external API calls within the flow instead of integrating with our own logic, forced us to rethink the side by side with our developers on the fly to get it right on a short timeframe.
4-Designed Experience
Aligned MVP Solution
Sharing The Invite Code
To make MVP launch dates, the simplest version allowing users to share access codes with friends was landed on. The result was a responsive flow, which provided users access through our system registration, and the ability to share an access code through their chosen method. Had we forced this experience through the console flow, it would limit user options. This solution allowed users to chose their own share path - be that email, discord, or text (as seen below!).
5. Final Outcomes
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.