VALORANT is a live service game—a game designed to last for generations after launch. To sustain interest and spur growth, Riot Games releases a steady cadence of new features like characters, maps, and seasons.

In contrast, traditional games (like Call of Duty) bring a whole new product to players, often backed up by blockbuster marketing budgets. Live service games face the challenge of making content updates stack up against the power of these traditional product launches.

REVELATION is the hero asset that led VALORANT’s 2023 season launch in the midst of the most competitive pressure the game had ever faced.

VALORANT launched in 2020 as a challenger brand into a sea of first-person shooter (FPS) games, a genre dominated by realistic warfare simulation. In contrast, VALORANT embodies the belief that an FPS can be something more—a game that reflects the modern culture and tastes of Gen Z by letting players express their style, passions, and diversity.

By 2022, all signs pointed to the strategy paying off: VALORANT was regularly on top of Twitch viewership, UGC made by players had racked up billions of views on TikTok, and it hit peak after peak in daily player counts, with nearly 70% of the audience coming from Gen Z.

Then in Q4 2022, two major competitor titles launched—Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II and Overwatch 2. Combined, these two competitors had hundreds of millions of marketing dollars, and for the first time since launch, VALORANT saw growth slow down.

Gaming is the largest entertainment industry globally. For the Gen Z audience especially, it has become part of mainstream culture and daily life, a medium through which they can form and express their identity.

The problem? Gen Z does not see themselves represented in the games they love. The more we chased this insight, the more we found their tastes and pastimes—which inform the cutting edge of culture—cast aside by the “rinse and repeat” franchise blockbusters shaping the gaming space.

With REVELATION, we aimed to deliver more for players. To reflect their culture back to them by showing VALORANT Agents participating in the kind of real-world activities Gen Z loves most.

We designed a character-driven creative platform to address the insight that Gen Z players were not finding their real lives and culture reflected in the games they played. For two years, millions of players had spent countless hours with VALORANT Agents in one context: on-duty, fighting to save the world. But, like players, these Agents have entire off-duty lives full of complicated relationships, demands, hobbies, and pursuits.

What do they eat? What music do they listen to? What do they wear? Who are their friends? What are their personal struggles?

In answering these questions, we knew we could connect Agents’ lives outside their missions with players’ experience outside of the game. Instead of selling a feature, we doubled down on storytelling at a depth that would show how Gen Z has shaped these characters, inspiring players to spend more time getting to know Agents as the story continues to evolve.

We went big for REVELATION, crafting a four-minute, story-driven launch cinematic exploring the lives of these characters in detail. We departed from VALORANT’s traditional scene (a pitched battle between Agents) and structure (linear storytelling), instead following our “out of uniform” cast in four parallel vignettes.

While one scene depicted friends at a cafe (along with a healthy dose of selfies and sharing of new music), another focused on a normally calm and collected Agent losing emotional control and being comforted by an ally. Throughout, we focused on a range of relatable player scenarios that showed how Agents, like players, exist in a world that’s not just the game.

To complete REVELATION, we brought a major player passion—music—to the forefront. Instead of licensing a track, we created a custom inspirational anthem in partnership with eaJ, a K-pop star and actual VALORANT player.

REVELATION drove meaningful player engagement and recovery and helped boost our growth in Q1:

•In the 7 days following release, player Daily Active Users (DAU) and game hours reverse the previous 3 months’ worth of declines seen from competitive releases.

•Shortly after, VALORANT achieved its highest-ever single day DAU and total spend

It made a global impact with Gen Z and gaming culture:

•REVELATION peaked as the #3 trending video worldwide on YouTube.

•The day after REVELATION’s launch, VALORANT was the #1 viewed game on Twitch globally, with 550K peak viewers.

We created a song consumed by players and non-gamers alike, establishing VALORANT as a legitimate force in music:

•The custom song, VISIONS (feat. eaJ), became the most-listened VALORANT song, with players streaming it over 7M times in 30 days.

•VALORANT conversation in Asia lifted by 10% due to eaJ partnership.

A core brand value of VALORANT is to be unapologetically global. When the game has major moments, their entire global playerbase should feel represented, so there is no one country that to focus on. This truth is lived through the product itself, with every Agent coming from a different part of the world.

To ensure that REVELATION was an unapologetically global moment, we not only showed a variety of global locations, but combined various global perspectives through the selection of Agents in the asset and the relatable experiences that they were taking part in. We also premiered the cinematic at the same time around the globe, letting players from across regions interact over a single point of fandom. This was an important statement of unity as we looked to re-energize the core player, bringing back any lapsed players, and set the tone for a strong year, together.