Riot Games is developing a communication strategy that is different from other players on YouTube

We carried out a study entitled:” A year of video games on YouTube ” to understand the media strategies of the main players in the video game industry: platforms, publishers and franchises. We invite you to explore our dataset composed of more than 22,000 videos representing the equivalent of 3.65 billion views and 9.8 million comments using the dashboard below.

Explore the performance of the main video game players using our dashboard:

One publisher particularly stood out in 2018, Riot Games accumulated more than half a billion views!
This success is explained by the wide variety of content published and intended to maintain its community of players. The publisher limits its advertising effects by broadcasting few trailers, but builds a strong editorial line by addressing various communication objectives: acquisition of new players and development of uses using educational content to promote its best seller, League of Legends; loyalty of its community and frequency of consumption with music videos; consolidation of its brand in the field of esports with summaries and livestreams of competitions...

Educational content

Editors are increasing the distribution of trailers to communicate about the release of new catalog references. Demonstrating great creativity and offering innovative content, this content generates audience peaks supported by significant media investments. Riot Games can hardly produce frequent announcement effects with its only reference, League of Legends, and must maintain the activity of its very large community of players. Therefore, Riot Games is multiplying educational content to explain the game (what is it, how to play it, etc.) and its events in order to arouse the interest of lay players in key markets.

What is The Big League?

Music videos to develop the recurrence of consumption

Having fun while playing is good but combined with the pleasure of music it's much better! Always in its communication innovation, Riot Games has undertaken the production of music videos to offer a moment of relaxation to its gaming community. Indeed, during the League of Legends World Championship that it organizes every year, the publisher released a clip that quickly exceeded 95M views and continues to gain views. Thanks to its beloved brand image, League of Legends forges an intimate bond with its audiences and succeeds in building a daily, highly recurrent consumption of its content.

This clip is not an isolated initiative, another K-Pop song associated with the League of Legends universe (K/DA — Pop/Stars) has accumulated more than 249M views.

These clips are highly appreciated by its audience and generate a positive emotional charge. Indeed, twice as many comments contain emojis in reaction to these clips than on the rest of the content.

Discover all the results of the study” A year of video games on YouTube ”, made by Chandrache Golion, Erwan Le Nagard and Jeremy Danulot.