Making Globally Impactful Microsites at Riot Games

Jason Rose

Alright, thank you very much. It's great to be here. Today, I'm excited to talk about how Riot Games creates globally impactful microsites. But before we dive into globally impactful microsites, let's briefly discuss who we are. Riot Games, as the name suggests, is a gaming company. We produce and publish online competitive, usually multiplayer games. We emphasize serious gameplay, offering titles that span various genres, engaging audiences worldwide. Our passionate community and the players themselves are more than just gamers; they are part of who we are.

Apart from games and esports, we also delve into storytelling. One example is "Arcane," a League of Legends story available on Netflix, emphasizing fantastic storytelling and amazing animation. Now, let's focus on globally impactful microsites.

When we say "globally," it's about regional relevancy, cultural sensitivity, and speaking the right language to engage with your audience. Riot Games has about 180 million monthly active users across 28 different languages, making it a significant responsibility that we take seriously. Now, let's define what microsites are for us. They are usually ephemeral, serving as a moment in time to project something relevant. They often have their independent domains, like mycoolmicrosite.com or as subdomains, such as mycoolmicrosite.leagueoflegends.com. They serve as isolated platforms for specific messages or campaigns.

In 2022, we created a charity voting experience that was globally launched. To build it, we started with tech requirements, including geolocation, authentication, localization, and data persistence. The site had different phases: opening, voting, and closing phases. The tech requirements laid the foundation.

We used existing tools to build the microsite, leveraging our muscle, which we had developed over the years. For instance, our localization pipeline allows us to receive translations in about 10,000 words from 28 languages within 24-48 hours with no developer involvement. Our authentication libraries offer easily embeddable JavaScript widgets, making it simple to enable authentication in minutes. We reuse internal APIs, and we've adopted a restricted development environment to protect work-in-progress projects from the public eye.

Netlify has been a valuable part of our toolkit. We use the Netlify redirect feature for homepage redirection, where we identify a user's language preference and redirect them accordingly. We use Netlify functions as internal proxies to validate user identity and provide API stubs for integration tests, among other things.

To measure the impact of our globally impactful microsites, we need to start with the "why" and define our goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). In the case of the charity voting microsite, the goal was to allow players to voice their votes on charity donations in their regions. The impact was substantial, with over $6 million donated across 28 regions, involving approximately 775,000 users who voted on where the majority of the donation dollars would go.

In summary, globally impactful microsites should focus on regional relevancy, cultural sensitivity, and speaking the right language. Our tech requirements, localization, authentication, and data persistence are essential. Reusing internal tools, leveraging Netlify, and adopting a restricted development environment help us create engaging microsites that achieve our goals and have a meaningful impact. Thank you for listening. Good game, and well played!