2020 has been a great year for Riot Games so far and fans have been enjoying and looking forward to several mobile ports of their popular PC games. Interestingly, when Riot Games was first set to announce their mobile versions of Legends of Runeterra, TeamFight Tactics, and more in October of 2019, there was serious concern among the team that fans would react negatively, and there was good reason to consider this as a real possibility.
While the team was hard at work, it was difficult not to look at how people reacted when Blizzard decided to announce Diablo Immortal during BlizzCon 2018. While it was clear that Blizzard expected players to react in a positive way, the overwhelming rejection of a mobile game in place of a real PC sequel weighed heavily on the minds of those working at Riot Games. Speaking about the need to prepare for such a reaction, and how best to avoid it, was Ryan Rigney, the League of Legends Global Communications Lead.
In his long series of tweets, Rigney describes five ways to avoid receiving a reaction like what Blizzard faced in 2018:
- Own your bullshit
- Lean into the memes
- Show the love in the product
- Surprise and delight your core audience
- Signal tribal membership
Each point considered how fans could potentially react, but most importantly, showed a key difference between how Riot Games viewed their project as compared to Blizzard. TeamFight Tactics and Legends of Runeterra, for instance, are strong new contenders in the esports scene and are being embraced by players on PC. To see that Riot Games was keeping that same care in a mobile port, sacrificing nothing and adding mobility, was a sure path to success.
Meanwhile, Diablo Immortal could be described as surprising the intended core audience, but definitely not delighting them, which is why Riot Games has such an overwhelmingly positive reaction to their mobile titles relative to Blizzard.
This notion of surprising and delighting a core audience, along with showing love for the product, can also clearly be seen in the announcement of Path of Exile Mobile. Even more, developer Grinding Gear Games leaned into the memes in their trailer, at Blizzard’s expense of course.
The point here is that ultimately, consumers are often far smarter than business gives them credit for. The announcement of Diablo Immortal serves as a perfect case study for how not to treat a loyal consumer base, whereas both Riot Games and Grinding Gear Games fall on the opposite side of the spectrum. By making games with careful attention given to the core audience and not infantilizing their desires, mobile game announcements need never be a negative experience, if done correctly.