Riot Surpassed $100M in the first 16 months with cross-platform measurement

Riot Games was founded in 2006 to develop, publish, and support the most player-focused games in the world. In 2009, Riot debuted its first title, League of Legends, to worldwide acclaim. League has gone on to be the most-played PC game in the world and a key driver of the explosive growth of esports.

As League continues to flourish, Riot also develops and publishes Teamfight Tactics, Legends of Runeterra, VALORANT, and League of Legends: Wild Rift. Riot also engages its fans across multimedia projects like music, comic books, board games, and Arcane (their popular animated series).

Did we mention that Riot also hosts a number of the most popular and widely viewed esports tournaments featuring dozens of teams from around the world? No wonder they have one of the most beloved IPs on PC and mobile.

After nearly 11 years with a dominating PC IP in League of Legends, Riot Games had a big mobile release year planned for 2020. In March 2020, Riot released its first mobile title, Teamfight Tactics, which was quickly followed by two additional mobile titles before the end of the year, Legends of Runeterra and League of Legends: Wild Rift.

Said knew they needed to upgrade their current attribution and analytics solution to achieve better reporting and data access, and they needed a contract that wasn’t cost-prohibitive when expanding the use of core attribution and analytics features.

“The RFP process was extremely thorough and focused on serving both the PC (desktop) and mobile games with the ability to aggregate, collate, and report on the data in a cross-platform environment,” Cody shared.

Riot needed a solution that could meet their cross-platform needs, deliver reliable measurement, and provide a single source of truth that also protected their players’ privacy.

Between Riot’s proven PC expertise and the team of mobile experts brought on board like Cody, Riot had a clear vision for the type of partnership they needed and the tool that would allow them to evolve their stack. Without an existing solution available in the market, Riot and Singular teamed up as design partners to build a bespoke cross-platform and cross-device measurement solution that would fit their needs and preserve players’ privacy.

Cody notes, “We require very data-secure structures, and Riot is extremely protective of player data, and Singular had a very good pitch for the data privacy angle that outshined a lot of the competitors.”

“At Riot we know this stuff takes time, and we’re in it for the long partnership.” Cody shares that the team at Riot is excited by partnerships that are hands-on and innovative. Riot ultimately needs a partner that’s as dynamic as their business.

After Riot settled on a user flow that would best suit their business needs: a web campaign to web landing page authenticated user flow; Singular built out an end-to-end solution that accounted for both Riot’s campaign data and the attribution of in-game events.

Users from a web campaign are redirected to a Riot web landing page for a specific app-site/ game where the Singular Web SDK captures all the relevant web parameters and UTMs from the original web campaign. From here, users are taken through an authorization flow (sign up) before they download the game. Riot requires users to login before launching the game which enables Singular to perform deterministic attribution with a customer user ID rather than the common IP-based probabilistic attribution method.

Riot is then able to choose to analyze its data via a web visitor-based, single-device report, or via a cross-device report with user-level insights.

In addition to partnering with Singular for their custom cross-platform and cross-device measurement needs, Riot benefits from Singular’s expertise in Cost Aggregation, alongside a plug-and-play marketing ETL that delivers granular ROI insights directly to their backend.

Cody explains that having a centralized tool like Singular enables his team to answer key questions like, ‘what did we invest in, and where’, ‘what is the return’, and ‘what is the change over time’.

Riot’s dedication to cross-platform success is directly tied to cross-functional efficiencies across the broader organization; represented in the way they organize their teams, resources, and toolsets.

“We’re a large company. We have a lot of teams. Data engineering and data analytics are stratified in a myriad of ways across the org, this [Singular] solves a lot of problems that would otherwise be introduced by having to have multiple teams – different data engineers and data scientists collaborating on a project to get us what we need. So this [Singular] replaces an internal cross-functional need”, explains Cody.

Using Singular to collate, measure, and distribute data as their single source of truth allowed Riot to eliminate an immense amount of engineering tech debt, and solve complex challenges across their large org.

Since 2019 Singular and Riot have forged ahead with an exciting partnership that will grow and continue to evolve, mirroring Riot’s evolution and vision for their own gaming and product development.

Now in 2023, after seeing such success with Riot, Singular is excited to GA its PC and Console measurement and analytics solution.